The Ranger's Journal

Welcome to the forums! It’s always good to have new people. :> This is a great idea for a fic! Rangers are an exciting part of the pokémon world to examine in more detail, given the fact that there are superpowered animals around everywhere; it definitely makes the maintenance and patrol of managed wilderness pretty interesting. I was hopeful when I saw the premise that we’d get a neat look into what it’s like to exist in Hoenn’s rainforest, and true to that, that’s what some of my favourite parts of this fic are: I love touches like the clouds of cutiefly over the water, the invasive furret, the migratory patterns of absol and tropius. It would be great to see more of what the forest is like to see, smell and hear, in details like these.

Catherine’s an interesting character to follow, I think. I get the sense that her theoretical knowledge is really good, as someone who’s just recently qualified, but her practical knowledge and experience is something she’s still building up – the manectric attack and the tropius herding both go spectacularly wrong, you know? But she knows all the movement patterns of these species and why they might deviate from these patterns. And I like her zeal, too; again, she feels very much like someone fresh out of the academy, all bold and indealistic and prone to denigrating other people she felt weren’t properly committed to the ranger cause. Her enthusiasm is a good quality, and it makes her a good ranger, but she sometimes takes it too far and it becomes a weakness, where she unfairly dismisses people, as with Benny.

Benny I’m a little less sold on, I think. Mostly because I’ve read up to the end of part three here, and so far the way things keep panning out is that Catherine, the vastly more qualified and experienced ranger, messes things up horribly, at which point Benny jumps in and somehow fixes everything by luck. Doesn’t quite seem right to me, particularly as we’re talking about a nine-year-old somehow succeeding where someone nearly twice his age (… they’re both so young! Sorry, I feel like my age is showing there :V), who has been expressly trained to do these things, keeps on failing. Still, there’s definitely more to come, so perhaps there’s more of Catherine’s skill on display in future.

Also, I can’t not mention how much I like Catherine’s interesting team composition; it’s full of pokémon you don’t often see in fic. Donphan, for instance, I have literally only ever seen in one other fic, and that was one I wrote myself. :p Semi-relatedly, insofar as it’s about neat little touches, I like how the pokémon population is shifting around here after the whole Team Magma thing – as it does in-game after Groudon or Kyogre is defeated. But what’s really just a little late- to post-game bonus in ORAS is actually pretty concerning from the perspective of someone down on the ground, and I’m definitely intrigued to see what Catherine’s going to make of it all and where her investigation will take her from here!