d_s_t_e's Wattpad Reviews

PC Zero Continued: Main Conflict

* Yet again, spoilers everywhere

So now that we've taken a close look at all six main characters of Pokémon Chronicles: Zero, let's see how they fit into the main plot. I've previously stated that the main conflict is group vs. society. I've also previously discussed the fact that society's influence is not fully understood until the end of the book and is only revealed very slowly to be the cause of problems. This is just one piece of a larger pattern of information being revealed in what I feel to be the wrong order. Because I want this to be as helpful as possible, I'm going to discuss both how the plot currently stands and how it could unfold if the author were to switch from first to rotating third person perspective and do some rearranging.

The prologue of the book introduces the main conflict of the book... or at least it seems to do so. It states outright that the land of Heroica is in trouble: "The wind stops, the sea is wild, and the Earth begins to rot." As we see later on in the book, all of this is true. The next sentence, however, throws everything into question: "The ancient catastrophe, a plague known as the Anima, is rising." Now, to a first time reader, this seems to be on par with everything that he or she has read so far. He or she will naturally think that this Anima plague is what is causing the natural world to become unbalanced, that Anima is a force of evil. A returning reader knows that it is not. This passage turns out to be not omniscient narration but a quote from a book entitled Heroica Revival Project Guide: Project Zero. At a guess, I'd say this was written by Panzer, the Flygon whose evil experiments led to the creation of "Project Zero", also known as Crystal. That means that we're not actually supposed to trust any of this.

The problem with having secrets and hidden information playing in the first paragraphs your readers encounter is that a first time reader will not be expecting such deception. He or she might easily take it as wholesale truth, which will cause confusion for him or her later on when our heroes start using anima power. Having just read a description that talks about the problem being a lack of bestia, he or she might conclude that anima and bestia are the same thing or that the author made some kind of mistake by using the wrong word in this section. A more suspicious reader might take it to be truth at first but notice the paragraph later on that seems to be indicating a totalitarian society of the type that might easily spread propaganda. Such a reader might arguably be the closest to being correct, but he or she also runs the risk of then doubting everything that was previously stated, including the crisis of the natural world and the prophecy of the shining warriors, both vital to the story.

Another problem I have with this prologue is its inclusion of that prophecy, not because it isn't important for the reader to understand something about the shining warriors but because it outright tells us in paragraph six (yes, I mean the sixth paragraph of the entire book) that the shining warriors are destined to succeed. If the main conflict of the book is about the shining warriors trying to achieve their goal and I as a reader already know that they will achieve that goal, any kind of tension I might have felt is lost. Does the book try to throw this into question later on? Absolutely, but I'm not sure how effective it is given the power of this first impression. The truth of the matter is that there have been many generations of shining warriors and that a good number of them have died without completing their quest at all, but the prologue gives off an impression that's entirely incorrect and will cause a first time reader to carry this incorrect assumption until he or she reaches a confusing correction.

Now, it might seem like I'm nitpicking here because I've spent probably three times as many words in my discussion of this section than the section in question even has, but I really believe that it's important for a book to start out on the proper footing. The story seems to be trying to do things like introduce the concept of the shining warriors and establish stakes, both very important. In giving hints at a less than ideal government (is it referring to a government?), it might also be trying to introduce society as an antagonist, but, if so, it does so very ineffectively.