Cutlerine's Nominations

Communication is a huge project, in terms of both age and length, and this year it came to a well-deserved conclusion. It's been emotional, it's been tense, and all in all it's been an utter delight to follow it through to the end.

It's just so good, you know? More specifically, it gets a lot right, observed from a lot of different angles. On a sentence-by-sentence level, Jax has a lot of interesting tricks going on, from the contrast between the designedly jerky sentences describing the movements of the mechanical pokémon and the fluidity of those describing the movements of the organic ones; on the plane of character, she's got possibly the most dead-on teenagers I've ever seen on these forums; on the level of plot and theme, the pacing is solid and concerns which might have been rote are handled in such a way as to keep them fresh and interesting. That kind of consistent high quality deserves celebration.

diamondpearl876 is really, really good at character. That's never been more true than in Phantom Project, which goes for the metaphorical jugular within a few paragraphs of its opening with Senori's incipient dementia. Possibly some of the story's effectiveness for me comes from a prior familiarity with the cast from the prequel, but on consideration I think there's definitely enough in Phantom Project for it to stand alone as an excellent story in its own right.

This is just a brilliant idea, well executed. Maybe it kind of plays on nostalgia a little bit, but the quality of the concept and the writing certainly provides more than enough without that. It's also absolutely adorable, and does an amazing job of capturing the sense of wonder of your first visit to Kanto, as well as the experience of revisiting it years later, older and wiser, and the way the magic still lingers.

I'll admit I don't read a lot of Mass Effect fic, but who can resist a good krogan? And these are some good krogan. Of all the races in the Mass Effect galaxy, they have some of the most distinctive and idiomatic language, and that makes good krogan dialogue – which The Fate of the Krogan has – a joy to read. It understands the source material well, it's well written, and it is in general a fine story.

I actually dithered over this one for some time, because Dramatic Melody has a real knack for interesting and unusual fics, but I think Humans of Hoenn is probably the stand-out idea. Simple, ingenious and superbly well executed, it does a great job of building a lot out of very little.

It's hard to write young children convincingly, even more so when you're trying to create a story in that voice alone. Dear Purrloin fulfils both briefs with aplomb.

Viking AU. I mean, that's it, that's all I need to tell you. It's good stuff, with all the longships, pokémon paganism, and sea-dragons you could ask for. It's one of those settings that gets the job done, if you know what I mean; it is spectacular, but only if you think about it. Otherwise, it does a good job of providing a space for the drama to play out, with its various factions and tensions.

Jax's Unova has everything a good cyberpunk world needs: glass, chrome, replicants. It's all the kind of thing you'd expect of the genre, but it's done with such love and attention, and it doesn't feel rote or uninspired in the slightest.

Oh, Drowning. I nominated it last year, and I stand by that nomination this year. The Hoenn games are tricky ones to write about, because Teams Aqua and Magma are frankly kind of baffling, but Starlight Aurate has done an exemplary job with the setting. Very much a story to keep an eye on.

It's not just the character development as we see it that's so good here, but the way it's integrated with the story and the big themes of the RSE games by means of the growth metaphor. Like so many really good ideas, it looks effortless and feels natural, and it contributes immensely to a really rather excellent piece of writing.

Okay, so I have a big soft spot for Wally, but even without that, there's a lot to like here. It might be compact, but it leans into a reader's prior knowledge of the characters involved to do a lot more with them than you might expect of a story of this length. Short, sweet, and smart.

And a third nomination for Dramatic Melody. Aqua and Magma members in close proximity always interest me, and this is not only that but a couple of dorks exploring whatever it is that's between them with tentativeness and a little anxiety. It's a delicate thing, and it might easily not have worked. But it does, and that's worth a nomination.

It's possibly the cutest story I've ever read. I don't think I've ever seen the sense of wonder you got on your first visit to Kanto better expressed, or the way the magic lingers when you return years later.

Okay, so it's an all-star cast from my favourite region, Hoenn, but even if the subject matter is exactly my thing it's handled with a skill anyone can admire. Canon characters are difficult to work with, partly because their voices in-game don't translate well into prose if you just copy them exactly. Yet every character here feels as they should, while at the same time the lens of authorial interpretation brings something new to the field. Additionally, there's some wonderful synergy between the characters' (especially Wally's) development, the burgeoning of plants and RSE's themes of nature's balance with civilisation. I've always thought Hoenn offers some stellar opportunities for canon character-centric fics, and Look and Listen proves it.

All the reasons that made Annie a contender for this award last year still hold in this iteration of the story. It's still in the early stages, but it already feels like the revisions diamondpearl876 made are having positive results, and I have no doubt that Annie is only going to become more compelling as time goes on. A character like her can all too easily slip into caricature or ridiculousness; it's the mark of a fine story that she doesn't.

Have you read Communication? That's sort of what I'm talking about. It's complex, and brilliant, and it could easily have gone to pieces on several occasions in the hands of a less skilled writer – but it didn't, and the fact that it not only did not do that but indeed came to such a satisfying end is a testament to Sike's skill.

This year, American–Pi's produced an awful lot of stuff, including a brace of Yuletide fics and responses to almost every single FFQ challenge going. That's a lot of fiction and, in the way of such things, a lot of time, too.

Perhaps not the nomination I was expecting to make here, but Electric Sheep hits all the right notes so well and in so many different ways that I think it represents a real step forwards from AEM in terms of quality – which is saying something, because that was a very good story. It's just that Electric Sheep is even better.

If you look back at American–Pi's work during 2015, and then at what she's produced in 2016, you can see the leap forwards in terms of both technical skill and in the thinking behind her stories. Leaving aside the fact that it was written for me and therefore contains things that appeal to me specifically, Twelve Days of Christmas shows a lot of consideration of what a pokémon's design might mean for it in a fiction context, and that kind of thought is what goes into some of the best fics in this fandom.