Today's fanfic review can be applied to many fanfics which is why I decided to do it first, I will be giving my opinion of hundreds of fanfics simultaneously. "Welcome to the (insane) world of Pokémon" is one of the top 10 most popular Pokémon fanfictions on
Fanfiction.net and sits at 395,000 words, this is novel length! Why would anyone read a novel about a self-insert into the Pokémon world that isn't even complete? In my case, I read it when I was so bored that I thought reading Pokémon fanfictions was a good idea and it was only 2 chapters long when I found it.
This fanfiction and many like it are the equivalent of those old stories they used to put into newspapers. Where the author would release a chapter every week over the course of weeks or months. Before you know it you've read a novel one piece at a time. This is that and it suffers the same problem of feeling incredibly disjointed and way too long for what it is, the plot meanders endlessly and subplots jump in and out of the story as the author forgets or remembers them. What you end up with is a story that is all over the place with no real point to anything because the author is just making stuff up as he goes along. A common piece of wisdom when writing is to always show the most interesting part of a characters life. Why write 100,000+ words when you can do 30,000 that deliver the same feeling and message? This type of story is the fanfic equivalent of empty calories; just something you might read to kill time and not much else. I don’t think anyone is ever going to clamour to read 100+ chapters of a self-insert plodding along on his boring adventure start to finish.
This review is probably lacklustre and scatter-brained but it had to be said. Finish your stories, plan ahead, and know your ending. I give this story way-too-long-for-what-it-is/10. Tomorrow I try to do a more in-depth and serious review of a Star Wars fanfiction that had me surprised as to its quality.
