Flower and Heavenly Thunder

Afterword

First, an apology.

Book 6 won't begin next week, it'll begin the week following (We still have one more side story for next week). I am just bad at math. Sorry for the confusion.

This side story, like the next one, is a story that shows another character's perspective in the events of Book 5. To me, it's important to show that Chloe's feelings are developing in parallel with Goh's, even if it's hard to show exactly what she's thinking at times due to the nature of keeping the story in his perspective..

As well, the mysterious nature of Chloe's interactions with the Legendary Pokémon seems strange, right? I won't say more for now, but please stay tuned.

Rather than the exact contents of the story, I want to talk about how I named this series and the books that comprise it.

Back while I was writing the first book, I hadn't decided on the name of the overarching series at first until I came up with the legend that features prominently throughout the series. And this legend, in turn, was informed by the title Goh was striving to achieve in the animated series at the time. After all, what is a 'Chaser' but 'One Who Chases'? I decided that I wanted to write a story where Goh was the main character, and to have him chasing after multiple goals, including his ever-evolving feelings for Chloe as well as his own pursuit of the mystery and tokens needed for Project Mew, so using this somewhat ambiguous sounding title of 'Chaser' in the title felt like it gave me a lot of freedom to decide what it was that Goh was chasing in each story. In Book 1, you can easily say that he's chasing down a token, but in Book 2 he's very obviously chasing Chloe.

Up until I committed to the naming scheme of 'Chaser and X' early on, I had given the stories titles like 'Stone Temple' and 'Memory' without adding the title onto them, but since these stories were all told from Goh's perspective and I wanted to differentiate between stories told from Chloe's perspective, I added 'Chaser' to each title, which also acts as a sort of allusion to one of the stories that helped inspire this one, Spice and Wolf.

But if I was going to call Goh's chapters 'Chaser and', then Chloe's stories would need a different title, right? I had a similar difference in naming in another story I wrote called Champion's Confidant. What title would fit her?

Given that Chloe's story in the main series focuses on her taking her time and deciding what path she wants to take for the future with Eevee, I had potentially thought of calling her chapters 'Bloomer', as in 'One Who Blooms'. This carries the flower motif she has in addition to working to emphasize what makes her character unique, but I'm sure any Dragon Ball fans can understand why I might not want a character being called Bloomer, and so 'Flower', while lacking the same scheme as Chaser, feels a bit better with less implications. And Blossomer felt too close to another fairly big story in the fanfiction world.

Next time, you'll see a story with 'Heritor' in the title, being 'One who Inherits'. The image in my mind is someone taking the crown from the previous monarch, so I hope you enjoy seeing who the main character is and what their perspective is on events!