Venia Silente's Nominations

[updated for grammar] There's not only the epistolary format here, but also the use of well measured sentences and other wordplay to switch between the contexts of one scene or event to the next, never breaking stride and never making the reader "jump" or be surprised by the mood of the writing. Of note to me was a passage near letter five where a sort-of-apologetic message switches to trading favors, and this writing style helps readers approach this story easily. The effect I feel particularly noticeable from letters four to six.

[Imaginative]:[Clockwork] does a wonderful work here of characterizing Team Rocket as a character, but before that: as an enterprise, as an abstract entity that is itself the sum of its functions, yet made insufficient because of them.

We see how the entity of Team Rocket is perceived by various elements across the chain of command from Boss to Grunt and at each level contrasted by various members and their views on ideology and function, and we see the "character" of Team Rocket operating under those perceptions. What's more, the story baits the reader by presenting the case as if it was about to be a sort of parody on the spy genre only to shift to what I could only call a parody on the management genre, if there's such a thing. Whether you are at work or still in school you are going to recognize and relate to someone, in some level of the Team Rocket structure here.

[Updated for grammar] This is not just your run of the mill PMD fanfic. This one has pirates, mystery dungeons that make sense, a whole industry around gummis, and even better: a Legendary as a main character and the author makes it work! While not exactly a PMD setting like that of the games, it sure functions much like one and the characters have to pretty much deal with it, and there's a lot of lore and historical context that makes the characters in this story read much alive.

Did I mention it makes its Legendary work? "Pleo" is the funniest Lugia you'll read for a while.

Sometimes we are treated in the fanfiction world with the chance to see the world through the eyes of a Trainer who has just lost a battle. Even fewer times we get to examine the state of mind of those Trainers. And in rare occasions like this one, those are battles that matter and we get to see how the sense of loss and defeat in a Trainer affects them. Here we have a Trainer who, good person or good Trainer as she should be, is simply "destined" to lose because of where the canon puts them in the plot: right in front of the protagonist in a forced battle script.

Writing about marginalized people is always hard to do reasonably, and it's perhaps even more uncomfortable when you have to read this character thinking he does not really get to know how he plays such a role or even how (or why) he's even put there.

SpitefulMurkrow makes a good work of presenting the Deino of the "Marked" low class in such a way that one can draw a relationship to many a kind of marginalizations: from the ISO standard "kid bullied by peers at school" who just wants to have someone to play with him; to the child who understands just enough of his place in the world to not seek out to pin the blame on people, even when he does end up meeting Pleo; to the simple person, inhabitant of their world just like anyone else, who is treated as bearer of a terrible sin merely because of the fact that he was born.