Chapter 50 is up.

Definitely a step back towards the older tone of Traveler rather then the tone it'd taken on in the Hoenn arc.

Oh, and that cliffhanger

 

Chapter 57 is up.

Spoiler: Spoiler

A combination of some good storylines, with a lot of set up as Ash finally returns to Hoenn

 

So, we've had a couple updates since the last post here, and this latest chapter is my favorite in the last couple. Heatran? being a scaredy cat was fun, and that entire last section with Jirachi was some spooky shit. A monstrous tonal shift with the corpses and death

Spoiler: the wishmaker

 

The Eruption is actually another Torkoal

 

I ignored Xion and posted this in this thread

Magnificent.

Spoiler

The battle between former elite 4, former gym-leader Fino Moore (grandfather of Flannery) and Ash was marvelous. It was dynamic, it was expertly put to text, and it kept me on the edge of my seat.

The way TSE wrote each of Fino's pokemon was awesome. Plinia the typhlosion was power. Lucy the delphox was incredible, and the way he wrote that pokemon's species was great - it's not your typical fire type. The delphox's focus twig along with her psychic power was picture perfect in its depiction... and then the Trick Room, and the pigeot's ability to defeat it with curse. Awesome.

And then came Plume's closest imitation of Lugia's aeroblast. A hurricane attack, shaped and honed by hard-fought, trained, psychic energy, much like Infernus's attempt to hyper-focus his flamethrowers with its own latent psychic ability. It was a brilliant payoff to a plot point that has been in play ever since Ash saw Lugia in the Orange Islands. But Plume had little chance to sweep the endgame. Kalena the salazzle, was her match, and scale-shotted her out of the sky.

And then came Oz, the electivire. She took advantage of the moisture and humidity localized in the air after the insane display of flames and heat from the typhlosion and magmortar, the pyrokinesis of the delphox.

Rain Dance.

The salazzle harnessed fury, madness, and hate. Nasty Plot. Then scale shots everywhere. She ends up blinding Oz, but then. Storm Surge. Harnessing the rain, the humidity, the electricity, and coaxing true lightning. Not a thunderbolt or a thunder attack. True, physical lightning from the storm.

Out-goddamn-standing, lads and lasses.

Even that bastard Mewtwo was elated.

It wasn't as fucking spooky as the-wish-maker and its menagerie of corpses, nor the horror of Groudon, but we're at a damn strong streak of chapters right now.

The story would still be better if everyone was aged up and Ash was, say, 16 or 17. But this is still my favorite fanfic of all time. A paragon of fanfic. The Flannery-Ash shipping is clumsy, but welcome.

The ending of the chapter makes me think that regirock might be bestirring itself, and that means that registeel, regice, and their sovereign might also soon be revealed.

I think that group might end up being the leagues' ally with the Concepts, along with Mewtwo. Man made divinity vs the concepts.

I hope Ash visits Alola before the end game. If only to sde how nature's dieties choose with whom to side.

 

My man The Straight Edge is on a roll! 50,000 excellent words inside of a month!

This was my favorite chapter in a while. Training, traveling, destroying poaching rabble.

 

To me, this is the definitive Pokémon fanfic. The tone is lighter than Game of Champions, and it just fits the source material much better. However, the writing is way way worse than I remember.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve aged, but the recent chapters have wooden characters and moments of dialogue that make me want to kill myself. I can’t be asked to reread a million words, so I’ll just guess at why I liked the early story so much. I think the straight elf is excellent at promising epic moments and delivering on the awesomeness.

The early part of the story was just Ash running around and being cool without too much development/screen time for the cast of characters; that’s why it works. The newer segments of the story start to spend more time with those characters, and it really drags the story down imo. The writing makes them caricatures and has dialogue that physically makes me cringe, and, no, I’m not exaggerating.

tldr: excellent ideas and uninspired execution. Every chapter feels like the author shit out like 25k words without any revision. It’s nowhere near the Game of Champions in terms of storytelling and writing, although I haven’t read that in years so that could be similarly flawed, but I like the overall feel of it more.

4/5- library worthy especially in a fandom with so many rancid fics