>>34883026And here's the part where I try to explain myself and justify my decisions!
Most of the events listed aren't really set in stone. The only key plot-points are:
Human boy is timid, pokemon girl is standoffish
They both get bullied for similar reasons, so they can relate to each other
At some point the pokemon defends the boy.
I wrote everything else around these ideas to give it some "meat" but that seems to have taken the focus away from character development. I probably should have spent more time outlining character interactions instead.
The changing of the genders was to make me feel better, more than anything. I will agree that, in this story, gender really doesn't matter. But I suffer from a constant internal struggle of religious values vs homosexual tenancies. For me, it was better to just make the change so I could stop thinking about it.
When you say "why are they what you say they are" I'm not sure if you me literally or metaphorically. I will say that you are correct in thinking that, again, the type of pokemon doesn't really matter here either. It could be a vaporeon or a garbodor and it wouldn't really change anything.
As for the interspecies thing, well that's just a forced plot. You may have noticed that in my small list of "key plot points" I didn't have a conflict. The problem is, I needed to a conflict to build the resolution to the romance, so a generic filler pretty much got pasted in.
Re-examining, the conflict probably needs to come from the character's interactions and insecurities, which need to be expanded on. That said, I don't know if I want to put that much work into a little idea I came up with on the precipice of sleep.
