d_s_t_e's Wattpad Reviews

Emotions and Aspects by CarnalTheEmotion [Pokémon]

Carnal is a Riolu who went through a series of experiments as a child. This gave him red fur and eyes that change color with his emotions. He doesn't know what his purpose is in life, but one day he crosses paths with a Swellow named Achelo, and everything changes.

What I liked best about this story were the characters. Achelo was my favorite. Before the story begins, he is working as a one-bird rescue team in a run-down village in the middle of nowhere. The Pokémon here get no support from the rescue guilds or really from any of the institutions that serve the larger area where the village is located. It's so small and distant that the outside world doesn't really care about it. The villagers are disillusioned and cynical, and some of them discourage Achelo from even trying to make things better. He's all alone, without support or even gratitude, carrying the memories of a team that either died or left him, and yet he continues in his work to rescue those in trouble and provide aid to those who need it. He is good just for the sake of being good, and this shows that he has the purest heart and great dedication.

Another character that I really liked was Riga, the Gengar who eventually joins Achelo's new team by way of a mysterious note. He faces huge discrimination and even the fear of rejection simply because he is a ghost type, and yet he, too, is dedicated to the cause of helping the very Pokémon who mistreat him.

One thing about both of these characters, though, is that I wish they would have been explored a bit more deeply. In Chapter 2, Achelo hints at a tragedy that befell his former rescue team, but the reader never learns what it was or how it truly affected him. Similarly, we never really see Riga confronting the issues of discrimination surrounding him. Nor do we really get a solid conclusion to the conflict in which the villagers fail to support Achelo. I feel as though both of these are important aspects of the characters and the plot as a whole, and I'm sorry to see that they fell by the wayside. It would have been great to see if the villagers' attitudes towards Achelo and Riga changed at all by the end of the story, and, even if they didn't, it would have been great to see how the characters themselves respond to that continued judgment and negativity.

Another plot point that fell by the wayside was Carnal's mysterious origin. From the first chapter, I didn't understand the nature of his backstory. He says that he was the "control" of the experiment, but I don't know what that means. To me, the control of an experiment is a scientific term for the subject who does not receive the experimental treatment. In a test of a new pill, for example, the control would be the one who receives a placebo (a pill that should have no effect at all) so that the testers can see the difference between the control group and the experimental group. This does not appear to be what happened to Carnal because he does show obvious peculiarities that make me think something happened to him.

To be fair, it is easy enough to figure out that Carnal truly was experimented on in some way, but I was confused about where the characters were at the beginning and how they had gotten there. Had the experiments ended right before we began, or had they been over for years and the characters had simply stayed together all that time? Were they released or did they break free or did some accident at the lab destroy the experiment and set them free? Given the fact that Carnal leaves the group and never returns to it, plus the fact that the group is only mentioned one more time before leaving the book entirely, I don't understand what the purpose of Carnal's tragic backstory is at all.

Really, there are many things that are never fully explained, and there are some things that are eventually explained that I wish had been explained sooner. For example, I spent a long time wondering what kind of Pokémon Carnal was in the first chapter, and it was also a long time before I learned that he looks different from other Riolu because he's red.

All in all, it would be nice if the author went back over the story and imagined it from the perspective of a reader. What do my readers know about my characters right now? What do the readers know about the backstory here? Is there anything that I should be explaining so that they understand what's happening right now? It would also help the author to reread at the same time for any parts of the story that might have been forgotten. Those things could either be taken out (if they didn't turn out being as important as it was thought they would be) or be used as a starting point for pieces to be added that would provide proper conclusions.

This story also has a LOT of errors in it. So many, in fact, that I stopped keeping track after the first chapter because, by that point, it was clear enough that it was an issue. There were dialogue errors, homophone errors, missing commas, uncapitalized letters, incorrect verb tenses, missing apostrophes, missing periods, issues with subject-verb agreement, run on sentences, etc. Is it still readable? Technically. But it's something that's going to drive away a lot of potential readers. I would really encourage the author to put some effort into learning how to avoid these errors, perhaps by starting with just one thing like apostrophes and moving on step by step to more difficult things. I would also recommend trying something like Grammarly, which can catch a lot of these mistakes and give corrections. At the very least, doing that will help make the book more palatable for the readers.

I can tell that the author of this book put some passion into it-- from the characters to the excellent use of geography as a cause of social and cultural issues, there were some deep threads running through it. I also loved the way that the book seemed to be using a traditional rescue team format but then subverted my expectations by depicting the rescue missions in a completely fresh light. My biggest issue, though, is that the plot seems like it was pieced together as the author went, and many things are either not explained when they should be or abandoned as the book goes on. With a book as short as this, it would be nice if the author took a bit of time to rewrite it, adding or removing pieces to smooth out the plot and fixing at least some of the technical errors in it.