Cutlerine's Nominations

There aren't a lot of fanfictions doing what The Progression does, which is probably why it's always seemed so interesting to me. While the earlier chapters do find it a little hard to strike the right balance between the difficulty that seems integral to their project and the free and easy communication that the surface story requires, the story's really come into its own this year, and Prax should be proud of what she's achieved with it.

OK, so I'm biased: this was literally written for me, after all, as part of Yuletide, and so it has things in it that I specifically like, but I think its merits stand alone as well. It's smart, it's witty, and it's tightly structured. It's just a good short story, is all.

The Trick Master is a tragically under-explored character in fanfiction, and The Master's Trick steps in to fill the breach in a wonderfully eccentric way.

The Progression is all about style, pulling together several different ideas and strands of thought into one cohesive and dazzling performance. Sometimes it's opaque, true, but in a way that's stylistically valuable rather than puzzling: when you come to a part that's hard to understand, it feels like it's supposed to be there, instead of feeling frustrating, and that's no mean feat.

Aarune, and his obsession with Secret Bases, makes perfect sense from a gameplay point of view but is kind of insufficient from a narrative one. Sharing Secrets does a good job of filling in the gaps and creating a background to an otherwise fairly superficial side character.

Aarune doesn't have a whole lot of character in-game, and he doesn't need it: he's not much more than a foil for the Secret Base mechanics in ORAS. But Sharing Secrets makes him an actual person, with a history and a mind, and the result is really quite special.

The protagonist shoots a puppy, what more do you want. But aside from that, the slow build-up of the relationship between the espeon and its trainer combined with the mounting sense that it will end badly and the brutal speed with which it does are pretty sad, and the framing device of the growlithe in the graveyard just sharpens it.

The journey fic is sort of archetypal for Pokémon fanfiction, I think, and it turns up in many different (sometimes near-unrecognisable) forms – but the most effective I've seen in the last couple of years is this one, which doesn't stray too far from the recognisable format. A good journey fic is always about more than just travelling around, and love and other nightmares delivers in style. I liked it last year, and like it more this year, when many of the early weaknesses have been patched over and improved on.

You beat the Champion, and nothing changes. This is for gameplay reasons, obviously, but it's a really interesting subject to explore; not only does this story explain why all these new champions leave the League almost immediately to do other things, but it does so by taking a kind of humanising (and humane) approach that is immensely appealing.

I've drafted quite a few different versions of a conversation like this, between Sycamore and Lysandre after the fall of Team Flare, but none of them have been this good. It's a really compelling subject that's always seemed to me to be begging for someone to write about it, and Bay does so very well indeed.

Diamondpearl876 is great with character, and that's foundational to most of the types of story that get posted here on Serebii. It's certainly a skill that deserves recognition.

I haven't nominated Jax for much this year, but she is exceptionally good, in all the story formats she undertakes to work with. That flexibility of skill is pretty rare.