Subject: Hat is on.
Author:
Posted on: 2020-03-01 02:25:43 UTC

Off the bat I'm going to have to say Permission Denied.

Red flag number one for me is not listening to Neshomeh's advice during your beta search to wait on attempting Permission again. Red flag number two is that these are completely different characters than the ones you applied with barely more than two weeks ago. It tells me that you don't listen to advice and that you're not taking care to make your stories the best they can be, which isn't what we want in a PPC writer.

Moving on to the rest of the attempt itself:

Badfic is fine. Or bad, I guess I should say. Definitely bad enough to mission, no problems here.

Scrap the leitmotif section on the agent bios. It's unnecessary and follows the sort of thing we generally aren't impressed by when sporking badfic profiles. Swampert should probably (I say probably, but this is a very strong suggestion for me) have a name. I know that in the Mystery Dungeon series outside of the player and partner Pokémon, characters typically don't have names. But, now that he's in the PPC, there's a solid chance either he'd adopt one or someone will nickname him—you wouldn't want to talk to somebody whose name is just "Human" after all.

One prompt is significantly shorter than the other (and they're unmarked, so I'm not certain which prompts you were writing for). I'll get to the first one in a second.

For the second, it cycles through a ton of emotions very quickly, but only very shallowly touching on them. You don't give us enough time to wonder about Vanille's planned mischief before she's suddenly mopey, then Swampert gives her a quick motivational speech, and then she's excited and he laughs.

It's a lot to cram into one short story without picking a few of those things to focus on; you don't develop the characters' emotions and reactions to their situations and each other before rushing ahead to the next. It comes across as rushed, which considering how recently you applied with a different set of agents, makes me think it was.

The first prompt is even more rushed and barely gives us time to figure out what's going on in the story. And what's going on left a bad taste in my mouth.

Vanille casually—no matter how accidentally—murdered a canon character and the story tries to play it for laughs. Can Medical revive dead canons? Yes, but that should really be kept to a) in-fic premature and/or noncanonical deaths, or b) in a Serious Business 'the agent screwed up big time', and that's not what the PPC's about. Agents getting in trouble is funny. Agents getting in trouble because they killed someone that's supposed to be under their protection, and it's presented as funny... really isn't.

SPaG looked fine and nothing really jumped out at me. There were a few run-on sentences, but that's nothing a bit more practice won't improve.

And please—next time? Listen to what we're telling you and wait. Develop one team, give them a good long think while you figure out who they are and how they interact with each other. Get feedback, and be patient. Good writing doesn't happen overnight.

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