Harry Potter and the Pokemon Thief

"Hey, Harry," a feminine voice called from several feet away, "it's time to wake up."

"Just a minute, Ginny," Harry replied as he wiped the sleep from his emerald eyes. As he slid on his glasses, he saw the inside of a small tent, not the familiarity of the burrow, his secondary home with his best friend Ron and girlfriend Ginny, nor his old bed at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Suddenly, Harry felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as he remembered where he was, and what he had lost. It had been several weeks since Harry Potter found himself trapped in a foreign land and managed to make friends with a band of Pokemon trainers. The young wizard glanced next to his sleeping bag and saw his red and white Pokeball that contained the Hoothoot that Ash had helped him catch when he first arrived. As he combed his black hair and exited his tent, he saw Serena with a puzzled look on her face.

"Who's Ginny," the young woman asked, curious as to who he was referring to. "Some girl of yours back from where you come from?
"Yeah, sorry about that," Harry sheepishly replied, "Ginny used to wake me when I slept at her house in my friend Ron's room. Starting last year Ginny and I actually started dating, and are a pretty serious couple." He paused as he thought about Ginny and how much he missed her. "Anyway," he said as he smiled towards the blonde-haired girl, "do you know what's on the agenda today? How close are we to Shalour City?"

Serena yelled for Clemont who quickly approached the two. "Hey Clemont, how close are we to Shalour City?"

The short boy pulled up a high-tech map from his bag, and expanded it so it showed the nearby area. "See this red blip," he asked, pointing to a red spot on the map, "that's our current location. If you look at this big black dot over here," his finger moved to a nearby black dot that was close to the red, "that's Shalour city. According to the estimates we're about four hours away."

Harry smiled and nodded towards the blonde-haired boy. "Ah splendid. I haven't yet been to a city yet since I've arrived here. I'm looking forward to seeing what Mug..." his voice stopped as he remembered that in this world his new friends were not Muggles, "what technology can be found in the various stores. If your inventions are any indication Clemont, I'm sure to find some nice things." The young wizard felt in his pocket and rubbed against several $100 that he had been given by Ash as the group splits any amount of money earned four ways. "Well, we just need to find Ash and then we can get going, right? Where is he?"

Serena sighed loudly and shrugged her shoulders. "Knowing Ash, he's probably training for his battle against Korrina somewhere. Let's go get him and then we can head out." She trudged off to find the young, ambitious trainer and get him moving.

Within twenty minutes, Ash Ketchum was back at camp, and Clemont had finally managed to rouse Bonnie from their tent and packed it up. The group set off towards Shalour City, and in what seemed like no time at all the quintet arrived at the city and went to the center of town to begin to head off their separate ways.

"Bonnie and I want to get some special Pokemon food for Dedenne, and then we might want to go to the local library and read up on Electric-type Pokemon battling strategies," Clemont explained.

"Ah ok, I was going to check out their fashion house and possibly pick up a new skirt," Serena chimed in, "I was thinking something with black."

"Books and new clothes are cool I guess," Ash said with a bore in his voice, "but I'm going to use this time to keep training."

"That all sounds fun to me," Harry replied warmly, "but I'm going to check out the shops and see what's available. I may head to the library later though to read more about Pokemon. Either way, let's all meet up back here in four hours and then head off to find Korinna at the Shalour Gym so Ash can battle, ok?" The group all nodded in agreement and then parted company.

Harry spent the next two hours perusing the local marketplace, trying to familiarize himself with all of the new kinds of products that existed in this world. He read about TMs, Potions, different Pokeball types , and every other product he could look at. As he began to leave a large store, he heard the store owner yell behind him.

"Stop Thief!" The owner yelled, as he charged towards the door.
Harry looked perplexed and put up his hands to shield himself from a possible attack from the owner. "I didn't steal anything sir, I swear. I just looked around."

The large owner pushed Harry out of the way and pointed towards the door, "not you kid," he shouted, "that Pokemon there is running off with a Max Revive, my most expensive product!"

Harry looked towards the door and saw a small Pokemon with a Max Revive in its mouth. The Pokemon was the size of a small dog, with four legs and had brown and white fur in an odd zigzag pattern down its body. At the end of its feet there were three small toes, and it looked like the Pokemon could stand on its high legs if it needed to use its arms. The Pokemon's face had a small black nose, mouth that seemed to be in a zigzag-pattern, and a black mask-looking feature around two large brown eyes.

"Oh wow," Harry exclaimed as the Pokemon ran out of the store. He then turned to the frustrated owner. "I'll try to chase that Pokemon down for you, sir. If I find it I'll be sure to bring back the item that it was carrying."

The owner looked relieved and smiled. "Why thank you, kid. If you manage to bring me that Max Revive back, I'll make it worth your while for sure. Here's a free Pokeball for you, if you want." He tossed a red and white Pokeball into Harry's hands. "You can always use that to catch that Zigzagoon if you end up wearing it down. That might even be a better option so it can't bother the market district anymore."

Harry grabbed the Pokeball and stuffed it into his pocket. "Thank you, sir." The young Wizard quickly chased after the fleeing Pokemon, seeing it off in the distance at least thirty feet away. The chase led Harry from the market district to near the Pokemon Center, and he was finally able to corner the wild Pokemon in an alley near the boutique. 'I might as well catch this Pokemon,' Harry thought, 'I got this Pokeball for free and I do only have one Pokemon. From what I've read so far its best for new trainers to get several Pokemon as soon as possible, but I haven't had the opportunity yet as I haven't bought any of my own Pokeballs yet. The young man reached into his pocket and pulled off his Pokeball and threw it into the air.

"Come forth, Hoothoot!" he yelled. "Time to help me catch this thieving Pokemon." His Owl Pokemon appeared in a flash of light, ready to battle. "Hoothoot, use Confusion on that wild Pokemon," Harry commanded.

His Pokemon flew above its trainer's head and eye-beams shot towards the wild Pokemon, causing it to be slightly hurt by the effect and become confused. It slowly started to bump against the walls of the alley and dropped the Max Revive it was holding, seemingly unsure of what was going on. Within several seconds, the Pokemon glared at Hoothoot and jumped off of the ground, trying to throw its entire body at the attacking Flying-type Pokemon.

"Hoothoot, dodge the attack and counter with Peck," Hary yelled to his Pokemon.

The bird was able to successfully evade the attack by flying several feet higher than the wild Pokemon's trajectory, leaving the Pokemon to crash onto the ground of the alleyway. The Pokemon turned and faced Hoothoot again, this time lowering its head to try another attack.
"Hoothoot, use Wing Attack on that Pokemon," Harry commanded.

"We've got to knock it out before it comes to its senses and runs away again!"

His Pokemon hooted in response, and started to fly low as his wings glowed white, however, before he was able to execute the attack, the wild Pokemon jumped and stuck the Flying-type Pokemon with his head, causing Hoothoot to plummet the several feet from the air to the ground.

"No, Hoothoot," Harry yelled as he watched his Pokemon hit the ground. After several seconds, the Hoothoot was able to stand up on its foot and take flight several feet in the air. Its wings once again glowed white as it moved quickly and stuck the wild Pokemon. The confused Pokemon yelled in pain and tried to attack Hoothoot with its claws, but it ended up scratching itself in the face with a flurry of claws and then fell down on its side.

"Terrific, I think it's ready to be captured," the young wizard exclaimed. He readied the spare Pokeball that the shop owner had given him and threw it towards the wild Pokemon, and watched as it was sucked up into the ball. After several shakes, the Pokeball hummed, signaling that the Pokemon was captured. Harry ran forward and picked up the Pokeball, smiling as he held his newly caught Pokemon and picked up the Max Revive and put it into his pocket.

Within twenty minutes, he made it back to the shop where the wild Pokemon had stolen from. He handed the Max Revive to the shop-owner, who smiled.

"Thank you very much young man," he said while patting Harry on the back. "Since you were able to retrieve my most expensive store item, here are four Pokeballs and several Potions to help you in your adventure." With a quick hug and a wave, he placed Harry's items in a shopping bag and bade farewell to the wizard.

Harry walked out of the shop, new products in hand, and ventured back to the city square to meet with the rest of the group. By the time he had arrived, everyone was already standing there waiting for him, and Ash looked impatient.

"Hey, Harry," he began, "what happened? We were about to start looking for you if you didn't show up soon. You're like a half-hour late for the meetup. I was hoping to be at the Gym by now.

"Sorry Ash," Harry replied shyly, "I had to help a shop owner collect a stolen item, which made me run all over town. Even though it took me a while, I was able to capture a new Pokemon." The young man opened his new Pokeball and his newly-caught Pokemon emerged. "I also got some free Pokeballs from the shop owner for helping him."

"Oh cool," Ash replied, looking somewhat more understanding, "it's nice that you were able to help someone out. Plus you got a Zigzagoon as well, that Pokemon's pretty neat, originally from Hoenn."

"Hoenn eh," Harry responded, "that's pretty interesting. Anyway, I think you've all had enough of waiting, right? Let's go to the Gym!" He recalled his new Zigzagoon and the group headed towards Shalour Gym to take on Korrina.

Trying to get: Zigzagoon (5-10k)
CC: 10,632

 

grading for gryffindor

 

Heads up, Harry Potter was a large portion of my childhood, and I don’t actually know how many times I’ve read the books. A lot. I’m a lot less familiar with anything in the Pokémon anime, though (and by anything, I mean everything), so apologies for the lack of advice on that front. Also, same stuff that I mentioned at the beginning of “The Dark Forest” regarding your experience as a writer/the depth in this grade applies here.

Let’s jump in.

THE BEGINNING STUFF

You begin your story with your main character waking up. It’s not a terribly original way to start things off, nor is it particularly engaging—we’ve talked in some length about hooks before, so I’m going to ramble a bit about how you might want to consider a more dynamic opening. Here, with your introduction, we kind of go in circles a bit and tread over some old ground, but there’s nothing that’s screaming at me to keep reading.

This isn’t to say that you should start off with shit exploding or massive action scenes anywhere: a quiet opening isn’t by any means wrong. However, no matter the events that you use to set off your story, you still want to find a way to make the readers care about said events—maybe you start with an interesting sentence, or a strange bit of dialogue, or really anything that would entice a reader to keep reading.

I’d also like to point out that this is the second part of a story, meaning your introduction needs to have a second purpose: it kind of needs to segue between the first and second parts of the story. I read part one anyway, and I think you summed up the preceding events pretty nicely, even if it was a little oblique—there was definitely a feel of “OH WOW LET’S GO OVER WHAT HAPPENED PREVIOUSLY ON THE SHOW,” and that feel was a little out of place with the rest of the story.

Finally, I’d like to point out something that we went over last week—again, your introduction feels a little out of place with the rest of the story. The first few paragraphs are about Harry waking up and getting his bearings, and yet that doesn’t really contribute much to the actual plot that you seemed to be trying to get at, with the Pokémon thief and such. A lot of the first half of your story feels a bit like filler—there’s not much established, not much action, and the build-up that you generate hardly contributes to the climax of your story, which happens somewhere during the chasing of Zigzagoon.

The main thing I want you to focus on in the future is this disconnect, because it keeps coming up. You can choose precisely where you want to start your story, and I feel like you aren’t taking advantage of this fact as well as you could. Try starting closer to the action, or at least something closer to the center of your plot—as it stands, you’re doing a good job of introducing a story with your first few paragraphs, but you often don’t introduce the story that you’re actually telling.

THE PLOT STUFF

As far as I understand, Harry Potter has been dragged into the Pokémon world. More on the ramifications of that in a second.

The plot is pretty solid, although I feel like you end up having a lot of cool things happening to your cool character for cool stuff, but there’s not really a reason, which kind of bugs me. The universe seemed to bend around Harry so that things became easier for him—Ash and friends became his best buddies with next to zero work, they hand him tons of cash for basically zero reason, he masters Pokémon training in practically zero story time, this shopkeeper trusts him to chase after stolen goods for zero convincing, and then he gets a bunch of cool stuff for what was really zero penalty. There’s kind of a lack of focus on these aspects of the plot: rather, the cool things kind of get handed to Harry and don’t even factor into the plot, and that feels really annoying, as if you’re just giving your character a bunch of cool shit for no reason.

Regarding the receiving of cool shit: there’s nothing wrong with giving your characters nice things. However, just like in the real world, fictional characters need to work for what they get, or else it feels like you’re just bending the rules of your plot so that your protagonist has an easier time.

For example, you tend to do your battles pretty nicely. Imagine if, instead of having a battle, you wrote a quick sentence like “And then Harry threw a Pokéball at the Zigzagoon and captured it, and everything was awesome.” That’s a pretty momentous thing that just happened, and yet if you told it in that way, you’d miss out on everything besides the results. Oftentimes, it’s the journey rather than the destination that makes for the more compelling story—no one really wants to hear that Harry is a master Pokémon trainer and everything is great and the end; rather, it’s a lot more interesting to read about how he got there.

Seriously, I’m still not understanding why Harry got to travel along with these guys, or why they’re splitting money equally. There’s Ash being nice to everyone he meets, which is canon, and then there’s Ash babysitting random people, and then there’s Ash babysitting random people and then literally giving them hundreds of dollars for doing no work. Also, is Ash still ten, as is canon, and if so, I’m really not sure why he would feel the need to look after adult-ish Harry anyway.

Speaking of Harry and ages, he’s dating Ginny, and it’s serious, and that never happened in the canon while Voldemort was alive, which also means that that canon is kind of wonky there, and you made a big deal of wanting to get canon right in the URPG AIM chat/when I IM’ed you, I figured I may as well point out some of the canonical issues with Harry Potter I picked up:

Again, the above stuff never happened at any time before Harry fought Voldemort, so that can’t have worked out if Voldemort ended up sending Harry back in time.
Also, you have Harry remembering sleeping in two different places at once.
Also also, I’m trying to imagine Ginny sneaking into Ron’s room to wake up Harry, and nooope.

Nope, they still can’t do magic, so they’re still Muggles.

And that’s really all of the times you actually referenced old Harry Potter canon in this story. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t reference the work with which you’ve decided to cross-over, but if you’re literally getting canon wrong every single time you reference it, you may consider doing more research.

THE CHARACTERIZATION STUFF

I ended up adding in this section despite this being a Simple capture because I think this is where your story really, really hurt. Getting plot-related things from Harry Potter, such as Ginny’s sleeping habits, aren’t really unforgiveable—worst case scenario, you can always say you’re writing an alternate universe or something.

However, something that you really shouldn’t change during a crossover is how your characters behave. If the characters that you’re borrowing from other canons don’t feel like the characters that were originally written, then there’s really no point to use those characters at all. Here, there’s basically nothing telling me that the main character of your story is Harry Potter besides you. He doesn’t talk like Harry, he doesn’t think like Harry, and he doesn’t act like Harry. Honestly, if you didn’t mention early on that he’s Harry Potter, I would’ve thought that your main character was just a guy named Harry.

Like, where I really drew the line was:

This is a boy who promised to knock another kid off of a broom about ten seconds after discovering that brooms could fly, all to defend the property of a friend. This is a boy who went into battle against the reincarnation of the most evil dark wizard known with nothing more than his bare hands at the age of eleven. This is a boy who founded a secret defense against the dark arts society at the age of sixteen even though it was illegal. This is a boy who, even according to your story, was willing to die to defeat Voldemort (and in unchanged canon ended up doing so, and walked into a killing curse without even raising a wand).

And you literally say he “replied shyly.” To a ten year-old boy. Who is gently asking where he was for half an hour.

Also, there’s the issue that Harry has completely accepted that he’s stuck in a parallel universe, stripped of magic, and all of his friends are presumed dead (at best, or tortured to death by literally the most evil people Harry can imagine), and he’s decided to, what the hell, just accept it, move on, and look, this shiny thing looks like Hedwig let’s dick around and play!

To put it bluntly, this doesn’t feel like Harry Potter at all. Honestly, this guy reads a lot like nice!Gaius (I’m thinking of the one from ‘Tales in a Blank City,’ when he wasn’t strangling trainers, but when he was talking all polite to Professor Oak), but there’s literally nothing that reminds me of Harry Potter.

Writing fanfiction with really, really famous characters like Harry Potter isn’t something you can just shit out in your sleep. It’s hard. My only advice is that you read, read, read—you need to be intimately familiar with how Harry Potter works, and that’s not really something that you can look up online or get told to you by me. It’s an understanding that you have to develop by reading and analyzing the character himself, imagining how he would react in certain situations (ie the plot that you’ve created), and basically understanding the character so well that you can become the author for things the author never wrote.

If it sounds hard, that’s because it is—it’s a million times harder to understand someone else’s characters over your own. But if you can’t capture the essence of that canon character, then you might find it easier just to write about an original character instead, because that allows you to invent and create rather than rediscover and adapt.

THE PRETTY STUFF

Here’s the section where I lecture about show don’t tell, again. A lot of times, though, the description felt exceedingly lacking, especially with emotions of your characters—again, a recurring problem.

Like. We touched on this in the previous section. Harry fucking Potter, the Boy Who Lived, it stranded away from his friends under the impression that he’ll never see them again. Hell, for all he knows, Voldemort won, and the world he knew and loved has gone completely to hell. He has no idea if he’ll see anyone he’s ever cared for ever again, or if they’ll end up dead like his parents, and no doubt that’s causing him at least mild amounts of stress or homesickness or some sort of yearning for the people he’s left behind. This is an important moment in the story, full of lovely important character development opportunities, and the most we ever get was really

…which I don’t really think addressed any of that underlying emotion at all. You don’t even mention Ginny or his friends after this sentence, so all of that “how much he missed her” amounts to basically nothing.

Other than that, I’m pretty sure you’ve received advice on this in every single grade, and I haven’t seen terribly much improvement in this section over the ten-odd stories you’ve posted so far, so I’m really, really not sure what to say here.

THE FINAL STUFF

Numerically, yeah, things check out.

Stylistically, I think there were several key issues:
=Harry Potter doesn’t seem like Harry Potter
=No emotional importance of anything, attributed largely to lack of description (aka lots of telling instead of showing)
=Plot holes/things not fitting with canon
=Tons of stuff handed to your main character for no real work or reason
=Weird disconnect between introduction and actual story
=No character growth

For a Simple-ranked story, most of these things would be too complicated to merit discussion, but again, you’ve been around the block here a lot, so the standards go up considerably. More worryingly, however, is how often these things have been pointed out to you, and how little you’ve done to change them. I know that some things on that list have mostly been pointed out by just me, so I’m not going to claim that I have word of god and you need to change your writing style to match mine.

However. A lot of things, such as showing/not telling, or working on Harry’s characterization, or having your character work for things, have been pointed out by a bunch of other graders for a bunch of your other stories. These are recurring issues, and you haven’t really appeared to do any work toward improving them.

I’ve sat on this verdict for a bit too long here. Apologies; I really had to consider.

You have most of the basic elements here for a Simple-ranked story here. There is a plot, grammar is clean, description is okay for some things (again, the battle was nice, and you tend to do those pretty nicely anyhow).

However, a lot of things that different people have told you many different times to work on just haven’t been addressed at all. These recurring issues aren’t just things that people bring up for fun; graders don’t spend time typing up long paragraphs of improvement for you not to consider at all.

As a result, I’m going to rule Zigzagoon not captured. Seeing issues that have been pointed out to you two or three different times cropping up here, in a Simple-ranked story, was enough to tip things out of your favor. I know you can do better in a lot of these areas; I’ve seen you do better.

Voltaire Magneton gave you some advice on how to fix Harry’s characterization, and I think that’s what I want you to focus on most of all (and if you end up working on that, some other things, such as having things handed to Harry with no work, and lack of description of anything regarding Harry’s feelings/telling not showing, will fall into place as well). As it stands, nothing in this story reminds me of Harry Potter besides the name, and for a crossover, it’s absolutely vital that you capture the essence of this character. If you do that, and if you maybe spend some time addressing some of the things mentioned above that graders have talked to you about before, you’ll have your Zigzagoon.

I’m never really sure how to juggle writing failing grades, so if you have any questions, hit me up and I’ll be happy to re-clarify.