Pokémon Book Reviews

Individual Review of Adopt Me by Masked_Umbreon [Not on Wattpad]

(d_s_t_e)

Adopt Me is a Pokémon fanfic oneshot about a Mimikyu who lives in a cardboard box and is hated by everyone until the day when her life finally turns around.

This is a one shot that is drawing on the new Alolan Pokémon Mimikyu and the fascinating backstory that it has been given by the creators of the franchise. There have always been certain Pokémon that hold a special appeal due to their hauntingly sad stories, from Cubone, the Pokémon who wears the skull of its dead mother, to Absol, the Pokémon who is hated by the very people it tries to warn about oncoming disasters. These characters have obvious appeal to fanfic writers due to the depths of emotion already present in our common understanding of them.

As might be expected, this one shot tells us the story of a Mimikyu that includes all the sadness of the canon. The Moon Pokédex describes it like this: "A lonely Pokémon, it conceals its terrifying appearance beneath an old rag so it can get closer to people and other Pokémon." This story describes just that, a lonely Pokémon that creates a disguise that looks like a Pikachu in order to conceal its true appearance. The obvious impulse is to be sympathetic to such a character, and, based on the comments on this story, many readers were.

Personally, though, I prefer to read stories that add something more to the canon. As a person who played Pokémon Moon, I became familiar with Mimikyu's story, and I reacted with the appropriate emotions at that time. Reading portions of this story simply reminded me of the story that I had already known. I'm not saying that fanfiction shouldn't use the story of Mimikyu as it is told in canon, but I am saying that fanfiction should be used to expand on it in a meaningful way or to provide fresh insights or a new angle.

I felt as though this story was doing far more telling than showing, which meant that there wasn't much added by way of details. I also felt as though some aspects of the story weren't fully thought out, such as when the Mimikyu conveniently finds all of the necessary supplies to create a Pikachu disguise. That seems unlikely for a creature living in a cardboard box, and what seems even more unlikely is that the Mimikyu wouldn't want to provide more details about how she made a discovery that changed her so completely.

The biggest problem I had though, was the question of why the Mimikyu in this story chose to create her Pikachu costume at all. She says plainly that she hates Pikachu. She also says that people continued to hate her, even after she disguised herself. In fact, she says that they treated her even worse. This makes me question both why she created the disguise in the first place and why she chose to keep it. Why would she want to take on the appearance of a thing she hates? If the only motivation was to cater to people who love Pikachu, why not abandon the hated thing when it has the opposite effect?

Another issue is that I knew exactly how the story was going to go from the minute I read the description. It gives away basically everything. I know that the Mimikyu I'm reading about is going to find someone who changes her life for the better. I know that she's going to have a happy ending, and that eliminates any kind of tension I may have otherwise felt.

Even beyond that, there was no good build up of tension from the beginning of the story to its climax. It says in the second paragraph: "My life was a living hell". I don't know about you, but I can't imagine anything that would be worse than that. That means that we're being hit right off the bat with everything being as bad as it possibly can be. That makes it impossible to have any kind of rising action.

What I would really like to see in this story is for it to begin at a point of lower tension, perhaps at a time soon after Mimikyu had been abandoned (I assume that's what happened), when she still had some hope of being adopted by a caring person. Then I would like to see a gradual building of disappointments and a loss of hope. The Pikachu costume only makes sense if she has a good reason for it. I can understand why the writer wouldn't want it to make things better for her because that would destroy the tension and completely change the message. I think it would be far more interesting if she creates it out of desperation, subsequently loses her last shred of hope, and then clings to the thing she hates because she has come to hate herself. That would be a truly interesting angle, with an excellent depth of emotion.

In terms of the more technical aspects, the biggest mistake I found was tense switching between past and present. I also found a lot of comma errors, including many places where a comma was used instead of a semicolon. There weren't any typos or misspellings or words used incorrectly, though, so that's good.

All in all, this is a one shot that's clearly trying to hit the reader's emotions by using a sympathetic character with an interesting backstory. I understand the appeal, but the writer needs to do a little more work before I'll see it as something special.