So you're going to go the route of him not actually being likable at all or worthy of loyalty, but for some reason you end up submitting to him and being "loyal" (aka his bitch) out of admiration/stupidity? Seriously, just skip to rhe point where you ditch him. "Boot on Face" doesn't make an entertaining story.
I write characters based on what we actually see of them. I did my best to keep Paul in character here - this is just what he's like.
As for "submitting" to him... you know what, let me just address that below.
Various comments regarding killing Paul, with varying levels of seriousness I can't precisely determine
I feel like a lot of people just sort of skimmed the reasoning noted in chapter for not attacking Paul, so let me try summarizing it in a slightly different way:
You are lost in the middle of the wilderness, and are surrounded on most sides by forest. You have been stuck in this forest for the past week, despite all attempts at leaving it, and because of that, a bear has just tried to kill and eat you, an event you are highly interested in not repeating. Suddenly however, you encounter and are taken captive by someone, who even aside from sort-of kidnapping you turns out to be a pretty massive asshole, which he makes quite clear to you right from the start.
Now, you have no desire to be around said asshole for any longer than necessary, and while you're injured, you likely have the capacity to kill, or at least maim your captor in service of getting away from him. You might even be able to run or sneak away without having to do either of those things, OR he might just let you go on his own if you annoy or "disappoint" him enough. However, unlike him, you have virtually no idea where the nearest town, city, or just generally safe place is, and no way of really figuring that out on your own. Meanwhile, heading back into the forest (especially while still injured) risks the aforementioned potential bear mauling.
So, what exactly happens if you DO kill, or at least attempt to kill your captor? Well, 1) the friends/bodyguards he brought along with him probably beat you up and kill you, or maybe just leave you for dead, and 2) even if they don't, you still have no idea where to go to reach civilization, and are once again lost in the middle of nowhere, very possibly with an angry bear still after you. If you run away into the forest instead, the latter still remains an issue, and you are also at risk of being eaten by something else entirely, as you are small, weak, and still hurt.
...thus, the conclusion you are led to is that the best option for the moment, loathsome though it seems, is probably to "play nice" and stick with the asshole until either a) he reaches civilization with you in tow, or b) you manage to figure out which way he's heading and steal his map before escaping, or something of the like. It's like a choose-your-own adventure book: Options 1 and 2 both may sound viscerally appealing in the moment, but seem a lot more likely to lead to BAD ENDs than the far less appealing Option 3. As noted in the chapter, it's a necessary evil, at least for the time being.
This metaphor kind of ended up being too literal, but hopefully this helps people follow the intended train of logic a little better.
did you actually read it? she's staying because just going back into the wilderness now will likely just have the ursarang find and kill her.
It's not even necessarily the Ursaring, it's the realization of "Oh wait I'm FOOD FOR THINGS NOW".
You seem to be complaining about your own assumptions about the direction and conclusion of an entire character arc, more or less the moment it started.
Yeah, no matter how I plan on this continuing from here, I wouldn't introduce Paul and then kill him off/remove him from the plot within the span of a chapter. I don't intend the current state of things to continue in this particular manner for long, but I'm not going to just bring up a plot point only to immediately remove any impact it may have. For those who seem angry at the direction they think this is going, please just be patient, alright?
You could literally just have walked away. Just gone for a bath and not come back. Wanting a trainer and settling for Paul are two different things.
Correct, as mentioned in the chapter. The question however is: walk away to
where, exactly?
There is also this. Given that this is a setting with a more tangible sort of destiny, it isn't an unreasonable conclusion. Obviously, this is for plot reasons, but it is interesting to see a character that's actually somewhat conscious of it.
I feel like she should push back against destiny at least once before concluding that it's inescapable.
Oh, definitely. "Because destiny MIGHT have said so" is not nearly a good enough reason to just let things happen to you as they may, especially since said destiny could just as easily be meant to entail getting away from Paul at the earliest convenient opportunity.
I give the guy a day at this rate.
That is "push until they break", and sadly for him this is not a case where "break" means "break down in tears".
"Push until they snap" would likely be more accurate, and most likely on one of Paul's limbs.
Now, I can mostly get going along for that whole day, at least out of fear of the wilderness, but I do not in any way expect the SI to actually put up with this long term.
You're not wrong. I'm not the kind of person who can just sit and take poor treatment from someone, even
with the earlier justification. As previously mentioned, do not expect the situation to stay in this state for very long, one way or another.
Basically it's been 1 chapter and yeah I hope it lasts less time than more also with him but at least trust the author a little. This doesnt feel like a long term thing at the moment anyway. It's a fanfic not a book so unfortunately we just have to wait and see.
This is the downside of writing something piece by piece instead of publishing it all at once - you can get instant feedback for motivation and work at your own pace, but if a chapter ends off somewhere readers don't like (and there's nothing to continue to yet), pushback and dissatisfaction tends to happen in a rather fast and furious manner.
And in the Pokeverse you can build up resistance to being electrocuted.
This'll be a good reminder that the common sense in this world is different.
Next chapter will have another reminder of that, in a different way.
Paul is fine, he's basically Eraserhead.
Like a sports team captain who cuts underperforming or unprofessional players. He has no tolerance for bullshit and wants to build a team that has the same ideology.
Eh... he's a fair bit worse than Eraserhead, honestly. Eraserhead at least knows when to let up... though, if he genuinely did expel entire previous classes of people who did pretty much nothing to deserve it other than not meet his standards, then he's pretty terrible too, just in a different way.
I have no problem with your reasoning for staying so far, I just really hope you're going to leave him soon (with or without violent action against him), rather than "realising that staying is actually good for you" or something like that.
I will guarantee you that second possibility will NEVER happen in this story so long as Paul continues to act the way he does. Paul may have more reasoning behind his actions than I can actually show just yet, but I am absolutely not going to advocate for people to stay with their abusers out of the notion it's somehow "good for them", whether in writing or anything else.
Yeah not so sure how good this will turn out to be. Seems like its going to be angsty & victimy, if so I'm not so sure if this will continue to be entertaining or transition over to being tiresome.
Angsty, maybe sometimes, as most stories with actual conflict occasionally are. "Victimy" though... well, there are certainly no long term plans for such.
Just a thought, Flairina is technically one and a half month old right? What she did is technically impressive for her age. Now if only Paul would know that... Or not, don't want him to raise the bar yet.
Not really sure where that number got pulled from. Mawile!me has been here for a week, now a week and a day. Whether or not said body is only a week old, equivalent in growth to my actual age, or unrelated to either factor, is currrently completely unknown.
It seems more that the former path is longer and less initially rewarding, but can get you much more surprising results.
As with many things in life, or so they say.
I like that better. Pokemon are too smart for it to be like dog fighting and they can give consent. It's like all pokemon are just born with the ability, and most, also, the inclination to be a UFC fighter
I think that was basically declared canon at some point, actually. Almost all Pokemon supposedly just like to fight, and actively seek out conflict, hence why so many are eager to go along with trainers that can make them stronger and get them into more fights. Don't have a source on that, mind, so take it with a grain of salt.
"Electrocute her. Don't stop until she stops you." That's not a battle.
Nothing in this chapter can be described as "training"... it's pure dominance exercise.
Not entirely wrong. Though, I will say the fight here was more of a "preliminary evaluation", albeit done in an incredibly painful way, and the so-called resistance training actually has another, non-cruelty related purpose to it that Paul didn't explicitly mention. Not that this makes any of what Paul is doing okay, but there IS a reason to most of it that doesn't just boil down to him being a dick (even if he most certainly is).
Nope! At this point I can only hope she does something so horrendous that it would make a QQ thread queasy about.
Well, that would get the thread locked at the very least, so I'm gonna have to say no to that just on general rules and principles.
The amount of sheer unbridled hate for a 14 year old lad who's being a massive dick is astounding. I feel like jumping straight to murder is a bit much, yeah?
There's a reason I got about three chapters into a Worm fic before immediately deciding to stop writing for the fandom altogether. People's sheer hatred for just-into-their-teens antagonist characters, particularly bullies, just
explodes on SB and SV.
I kind of wonder what the deal with fairy-type being a known thing means.
It means I didn't want to have to try and deal with the logic of Fairy types somehow not having been discovered before now, despite the fact that there are many common pure Fairy-typed Pokemon, as well as a literal Fairy-type themed Champion. ^_^;
The issue is that Siwile is being thrown into the deep end, and Paul's party is two for two for assholes.
Well, he has at least
one other party member, who probably isn't, but ah... there might be different issues there.
Ya know, there is an other option to defecting via running into the forest. There's another trainer around who would probably just shrug at a pokemon who isn't that interested in fighting.
This is like saying that if you get lost and separated from someone in the woods, picking a random direction and walking that way will eventually guarantee you meet up. Forests are
big, and Paul has presumably been travelling for multiple hours now. Besides which, Mawile!me doesn't even know if the nearby forest is the
same forest as the one I just got out of - there's a LOT of woodland in the Pokemon world, particularly in the anime, where half the episodes tend to be spent surrounded by trees. If Ash (and his presumed company) are still anywhere in the vicinity, Mawile!me isn't going to know it without them literally just happening upon Paul's campsite.
i agree pauls a dickbag and screw him and all that, and he could be overly harsh to point of verbal abuse especailly but idk that i'd consider what he's doing to his pokemon torture.
Pokemon probably have a higher threshold for what can really be considered "torture" since they heal (even naturally) so much faster than people do. Whether or not what Paul is doing here crosses that threshold is... difficult to say, as a result.
Im starting to think that putting Paul into the story might not be a good idea. Not for the story but for the thread. Im feeling a bit too much hate and some passionate back-and-forth from the posters...
Fun fact: An early idea for this fic was to simply let Mawile!me stumble onto a road in a state of exhaustion at the end of Chapter 3 (after running for most of the day and night away from the Ursaring), then get caught by some random kid/trainer on their way to Jubilife while too tired to fight back. Even though things probably wouldn't have stayed that way for long however, I ended up deciding against it, because I feel like SIs are generally more interesting when they affect a
known quantity in canon. "For Want of a Nail" type plots are a lot more intriguing to me in fanfic than ones that pull out OCs at every corner - not that I have anything against OCs, but a plot consisting of nothing BUT them tends to fall flat a lot of the time. Hence I went the route of involving canon characters, and, well, this story was always written as starting out in a specific forest...
I wouldn't mind straying into villain territory tbh, though him getting redeemed or punched by Ash or whatever are fine too.
Is Paul does get punched, it probably won't be by Ash, but I will not rule out the possibility.
Joining Team Rocket.
Humor me here. Meowth knows how to talk like a human. Jessie and James treat their pokemon ...mostly with respect (even to their detriment; see most interactions James has with Cacnea and Victrebel). While they are thieves, and are sometimes successful when Ash isn't around, they would be an interesting bunch to follow, even for a little while.
If this fic
does go that route, rest assured I will be reading Pocket Rockets beforehand, if just to make sure I'm not treading the exact same ground.
The thing about sink-or-swim training is that nobody starts out ready to swim, but we're all born ready to drown.
...that's actually a great quote, I just have to say.
not to mention, it'd just be a weird story choice for the author to have him catch her and then ditch her 10 seconds later.
Exactly - if there's no lasting impact to an event in any real fashion, then it's just bad writing. Rest assured that regardless of what happens, this writing decision was made for an actual purpose, and will not just ultimately boil down to "kill/get released by Paul and move on" without some sort of lasting consequence or story development.
