d_s_t_e's Wattpad Reviews

Pure of Heart by gofishstories [Pokémon]

* This review contains mild spoilers for certain plot points of the one shot but does not give away the ending

Pure of Heart is a one shot following the adventures of a young woman (sixteen years old at the start) who completes her Kanto Pokédex only to find that there is a mysterious pink creature still waiting to be caught. After a conversation with Professor Oak, she decides to search for it in Johto, then Hoenn, and on and on through all of the regions, catching every Pokémon in every one of them with increasing obsession. Will she ever capture the Mew that she so desperately seeks?

I have to say that the concept of this story is a great one. I nominated it for the Most Thought Provoking special award in the Pokémon Watties because it really attempts to investigate what would realistically happen if a trainer were to really try to catch them all. This is supposed to be the ultimate goal in the Pokémon world, yet, with the legendaries being included in that total and taking on the roles that they do, not to mention the sheer number of Pokémon species, the actual result of such a success would be troubling to say the least. This one shot gives us that twist as well as an additional twist – that such a quest is not good for the trainer who takes it on, either. As the book continues, our main character becomes more and more corrupt, and the ending really seals the message.

My biggest problem with the book is that it truly does try to cram so many events into such a small format that almost none of them seem to have any real significance. This is amplified by the fact that this one shot is told in diary form, which makes it especially easy for an author to slip into telling all the facts of what happened rather than showing the readers compelling scenes to catch their interest. A story told in this way has a number of different problems, which all have an unfortunate effect.

First, in a story without scenes, there is extremely limited opportunity for character development. I spent well over half of the story thinking of the main character as a man, only to get the shock of my life when I learned that "he" had gotten pregnant! Because the main character is writing a diary in the first person, never gives any description of herself, and never shares any scenes that would give clues as to her gender, I had no reason not to think of her as male. Even after "he" fell in love with a man, it wasn't a stretch to think that the relationship might be a homosexual one. After all, not even this relationship is described in any real detail. If I know so little about even the main character of the story, it doesn't bode well for any of the others, who are mentioned even less.

Another pitfall of the style of this one shot is that it made even the most exciting of events sound boring. Since we know that our main character is writing diary entries after the fact, there's a serious lack of tension. As soon as a new entry has begun, we know that our main character is alive and well enough to still be writing. Worse than that, though, is the fact that so many of the entries begin with the very thing that the rest of the section is going to build back to. In the first entry, we hear in the very first sentence that she has completed her Pokédex. Then she goes on to describe how that feels and tell us that Mewtwo was a great challenge. I'm willing to believe that it was, but I feel no tension or excitement related to that pivotal battle because I already know that she successfully captured it. A story written in a diary format can be successful, but it is very tricky to navigate it correctly in order to maintain narrative tension. Our main character just captured Mewtwo! I want to feel excited about it!

It definitely doesn't help that a story that unfolds over many years is crammed into a single one shot. I suspect that the reason why the format was chosen in the first place was because it was one way in which the author could shorten everything to fit. I suspect that the author didn't want to spend a lot of time on each of the events unfolding, and rightly so to some degree. A book that described a ten year journey scene by scene would be monstrously long and wouldn't be at all focused on the bigger picture ideas that this one shot explores. Even so, I think that there needs to be a middle ground between these two extremes. Not everything can be a long and detailed scene, but not everything should be a dry narrative summary, either. I would enjoy seeing this rewritten as something longer than a one shot, perhaps a short story in which the most important pieces of the journey each get their own chapter to expand in detail, while time skips and summary link them together.

Overall, the combination of the narrative style and the fact that I as the reader already knew everything about Mew (including the Pokédex description that was handed to me at the beginning of the one shot itself) meant that I was able to see almost everything coming in this book. From the events of diary sections being given away by the first part of the entries themselves to the one shot itself giving a massive hint about the ending, I was able to know or guess almost everything in advance. Combined with the fact that nearly everything is told rather than being shown, this meant that I spent a large portion of my reading time simply feeling bored. While I definitely appreciate what the story was trying to do and think that it does spark some interesting thoughts beyond the page, I wish that it had been told in a format that was more suited to drawing out its potential strengths.