Cutlerine's Nominations

Love and Other Nightmares is excellent, and I really like it, and you absolutely should give it a go, if you haven't already. Strong characters, so many awkward conversations (so many), a world that feels extremely real even as it shades into the supernatural at the edges. It's just great.

There's just one chapter of this so far – but it's a really, really good one. There's a superb trial challenge, some adorable partner pokémon and a protagonist with a lot of potential. Most definitely one to watch!

Dramatic Melody can always be counted on for a superb one-shot, and this follow up to 'Dear Purrloin' is no exception. It's light and delicate and absolutely worth your time.

Every time I think I have an issue with something that the plot does here, there's a twist, and it turns out that the issue was foreseen, that the story intended me to have an issue with it and wanted to investigate that. I don't get that often, and I've really enjoyed it.

I've never seen another fic quite like guidance. Gods and consumerism and a beautifully realised vision of what trainer journeys are, what they mean. You definitely should be reading it, if you aren't already.

Guidance just oozes style. The spareness of the prose works so well with the plot and the emotions it evokes; I could try to explain it here, or I could tell you to go read it yourself, and honestly I feel like the second thing is probably the better option.

Destiny has a lot of description in it, and arguably it could, in places, be better integrated into the main narrative – but taken alone, the description is great, and it explores this interesting Gaelic-Johto/Anglo-Saxon-Kanto take on the Tohjo region with great depth and breadth, weaving it in and out of twentieth-century UK history in a really interesting way.

Horizon is a fascinating take on the PMD world, broad and deep and richly textured. Most interesting, though, is how deeply flawed it is – and not in the explicitly dystopian way that a lot of PMD darkfic does, either. It's just a world, presented without commentary, with its own history and traditions, many of which are incredibly real in how they are at once deeply ingrained into society and yet also subtly, insidiously harmful.

Sometimes you come across a fic and you're like, I wish I'd thought of that first. That's what this story is, for me. It's all about what Team Skull really is, as opposed to what the people of Alola think it is (and what they tell us it is, when we meet them in-game), and it's great.

With such a huge cast, Ambyssin could be forgiven for letting some of his characters fall by the wayside – and while they do sometimes fade into the background to let others take centre stage, none of the main characters (and surprisingly few of the minor ones) last through the story unchanged. They grow and evolve like living people, and it's been great to follow their progress.

By the end of this one-shot, you feel like you know its narrator very well, even though you've only really seen a sliver of her personality. It's short, punchy and very effective.

I never really thought much about Nanu or Grimsley before Foul Play, but they go so well together. I'd say they bounce off each other well, but that implies an energy that neither of them have. :V Suffice it to say, I don't think there are many fictional characters whose relationship I've enjoyed as much as theirs this year, and that's worth a nomination for me.

I'm not normally a fan of this genre, but The Wysteria Files is a great creepy conspiracy story that acts as a really effective wrapper for a collection of spooky stories, and I feel like it's been a little bit overlooked. Well worth your time and attention!

It's not just that this opens with a beloved character from the prequel dying, it's that nobody is happy. Or they are, sometimes, but these feel like moments snatched from the jaws of a world whose prevailing winds blow in the direction of grief. There's a broad cast, with a broad range of different traumas, and the way they strain after connections and repeatedly don't quite make them makes this fic a more than deserved candidate for this award.

This is just nice. That sounds like I'm damning it with faint praise, but I mean it sincerely. Sometimes, you just want something sweet and light, and that's exactly what this is.

This is maybe as far from a standard trainer fic as you could imagine: a correspondence between a naive kid running from and into more than she's aware of and a prisoner so deep in the pit of self-recrimination that it's debatable whether he can even see over the rim. But it is a trainer fic, at heart, a story of people on the move, physically or emotionally, with pokémon (whether in the story's present or its past). There's nothing else like it. And it's utterly superb.

Guiding Light has featured pretty largely on my nominations sheet, and for good reason. It takes a lot to keep me interested in a PMD fic, but somehow this one has managed it. It's just good, you know?

'Hardy' was a delight. It made so much of its central theme, of hardiness and the capacity to endure in all kinds of senses, and it folded it into such a sweet story, too.

Casting Off is a spin-off, I think, but it works very well in its own right. Cabot is a delight to follow, and the richness of the world he travels through makes the journey all the sweeter.

It's difficult to do canon characters, but Bay hits all the right notes with Nanu and Grimsley. They're both so much themselves, and there are so many good one-liners and interactions, that it's hard to pick just one moment. And you shouldn't, really: all of them woven together add up to a brilliant portrait of two canon characters.

Same as last time, honestly. Annie is one of those people who reacts to things in ways that don't seem like the natural way to react, but which, in context, make absolute perfect sense. It's no small achievement to create a character like that.

He's a terminally anxious snake. Okay, but for real, Syr is really compelling. He's on the sidelines of everyone's tragedies, so much so that it can be easy to overlook the fact that these are also his own tragedies. It's an interesting, intense position to be in, and to watch him struggle through it has been a rollercoaster.

Kimberly is really interesting; I like how she bounces off Andrea, how the two of them can't seem to decide whether to go for each other's throats or become best friends. And she herself is a fascinating person: she's very sympathetic in a lot of ways and kind of accidentally, obliviously not very nice in others. It's a great mixture, and it works really well.

The manic energy, the sense of someone so caught up in an idea that he can't see past the moment of its execution; Archie only appears briefly here, but it's an extremely striking appearance.

Honestly? She's just great. I am not accepting counter-arguments at this time, thanks.

Go and check out the whole video section of Entry #6 – I can't do it justice just by snipping a piece. The set-up is crucial; Tulip is narrating a video of herself that she doesn't remember recording, in which all the details about her seem wrong, and though you know that nothing's going to get her because she is, after all, alive to narrate it, it's still really creepy.

You guys, it's just too cute! I'm a sucker for that kind of thing where someone searches for strength and, having found it, realises that their reasons for seeking it were fulfilled by the process, not the result. And this scene delivers exactly that.

This is the kind of action scene where the person whose POV you're following really isn't the kind of person who should be in an action scene. And it's really good at being that thing.

Gracie's most recent chapter in general was great, but she had some especially brilliant moments, too. This one in particular stuck with me.

As my nominations so far probably show, I really like diamondpearl876's work. It's just all so good, you know? So many memorable characters and awkward conversations. None of that's easy to pull off, and that it works time after time is a real achievement.

There have been a lot of new voices in the forum this year, but Firaga Metagross' has been the one that stands out to me, as my nominations so far have probably made clear. Both All Suns Must Set and The Skull that Bears Seeds are full of promise, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where they go.

Have you seen how many entries the Alola Dex has? And how rapidly all that has been posted? It's really impressive, and absolutely deserving of a nomination.

There's a steady upwards progression throughout all of Guiding Light that's been a joy to follow. I love seeing people get better at what they do, and if you go back to earlier chapters, you can really chart that progress. It's been great to see.