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Pokemon: The Origin of Species
Enter the world of Pokémon from a rational perspective. Instead of starting his journey in ignorance, Red has spent his years studying the creatures so central to his world... and he doesn't quite agree with all the information in his books. No time for rookie mistakes here: he's on a quest to discover the true nature of Pokémon, and maybe even find out where they really come from.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 15, 2020
Rewrote my childhood intelligently -- spoke to my inner child with as much adventure action and imaginative possibilities as if I were playing my first pokemon game again as a 7 year old while being able to satisfy my adult craving for proper world building, intelligent characters, and plots that make sense!
I'm glad I was able to carve up time to read 80 chapters of rational fan fiction applied to pokemon. I've spent a lot of time thinking how hard the pokemon world would be if it were real and this FanFiction does a brilliant job showing how hard it is!!
I'm glad I was able to carve up time to read 80 chapters of rational fan fiction applied to pokemon. I've spent a lot of time thinking how hard the pokemon world would be if it were real and this FanFiction does a brilliant job showing how hard it is!!
June 29, 2018
just awesome.
and IMHO, it keeps getting better (so don't dare stopping before chapter 10, or you will regret it. i stopped at chapter 4 a year ago, and it was definitely a mistake), and already at chapter 10 i was totally hooked.
and IMHO, it keeps getting better (so don't dare stopping before chapter 10, or you will regret it. i stopped at chapter 4 a year ago, and it was definitely a mistake), and already at chapter 10 i was totally hooked.
December 17, 2023
Updated, Dec 17
So I finally finished this book. And it's fine, but it's clearly written as a serial. And like all serials, it is desperately in need of being edited. Being edited down to 350 pages---plausibly two 350 page books if you're feeling generous.
Instead it's something like 1.3 million words --- nearly three times the length of War and Peace.
The problem is that there's just so many wasted words. Let's talk spoilers. There's some girl Aiko who shows up for like 500 pages, who then just dies, and it's a HUGE PLOT DEVICE. But it's hard to care because she's not a good character. And then some other girl just waltzes in and lives the dead girl's life. Like, living in her room, sleeping in her bed, hanging out with her dad, doing her chores. Why the hell is this two characters?
And then this girl doesn't have anything to do for the rest of the book. But she's still around, kinda doing her own thing. And then the main character's mom's subplot gets subtended by this girl without any closure on either side.
And then there's a big Mewtwo subplot, which is more interesting than the actual plot. But then Mewtwo escapes and that's the end of that. There are no repercussions to the story, and we never hear from him again.
THE WHOLE BOOK IS LIKE THAT. Some interesting bits that are hard to care about because almost none of it turns out to be relevant.There are glorious moments in this book, but they're nowhere near worth the price of admission.
---
Updated, November 11, 2023.
HOW AM I STILL READING THIS? I THOUGHT I ABANDONED IT.
I'm now 2500 pages in, and while it has gotten much more interesting, it's still not great. I think I just don't have enough on my kindle right now, and so it wins by default. And since it's not finished, I never remember to add more books to it until it's too late.
Vicious cycle.
Nevertheless, given that I've been reading this every day for half the year, I'm going to count it twice for my reading goal.
---
Abandoned. I made it 600 pages in, and while it was getting better, I wasn't enthralled. Maybe someone who likes pokemon more than I do would get more out of it.
So I finally finished this book. And it's fine, but it's clearly written as a serial. And like all serials, it is desperately in need of being edited. Being edited down to 350 pages---plausibly two 350 page books if you're feeling generous.
Instead it's something like 1.3 million words --- nearly three times the length of War and Peace.
The problem is that there's just so many wasted words. Let's talk spoilers. There's some girl Aiko who shows up for like 500 pages, who then just dies, and it's a HUGE PLOT DEVICE. But it's hard to care because she's not a good character. And then some other girl just waltzes in and lives the dead girl's life. Like, living in her room, sleeping in her bed, hanging out with her dad, doing her chores. Why the hell is this two characters?
And then this girl doesn't have anything to do for the rest of the book. But she's still around, kinda doing her own thing. And then the main character's mom's subplot gets subtended by this girl without any closure on either side.
And then there's a big Mewtwo subplot, which is more interesting than the actual plot. But then Mewtwo escapes and that's the end of that. There are no repercussions to the story, and we never hear from him again.
THE WHOLE BOOK IS LIKE THAT. Some interesting bits that are hard to care about because almost none of it turns out to be relevant.There are glorious moments in this book, but they're nowhere near worth the price of admission.
---
Updated, November 11, 2023.
HOW AM I STILL READING THIS? I THOUGHT I ABANDONED IT.
I'm now 2500 pages in, and while it has gotten much more interesting, it's still not great. I think I just don't have enough on my kindle right now, and so it wins by default. And since it's not finished, I never remember to add more books to it until it's too late.
Vicious cycle.
Nevertheless, given that I've been reading this every day for half the year, I'm going to count it twice for my reading goal.
---
Abandoned. I made it 600 pages in, and while it was getting better, I wasn't enthralled. Maybe someone who likes pokemon more than I do would get more out of it.
August 31, 2019
Note that it's not actually complete, I'm just caught up to the present.
This is the only book I've read recently on a Kindle where I felt sad every time the percentage read ticked up, because that meant I was getting close to the end. What can I say? I like the adventures, the characters have clear arcs that build on themselves, the stakes are real if fantastical, and there's just enough education mixed in that I feel like I'm learning. I would read hundreds of thousands of more words set in this version of the Pokemon universe if I could.
This is the only book I've read recently on a Kindle where I felt sad every time the percentage read ticked up, because that meant I was getting close to the end. What can I say? I like the adventures, the characters have clear arcs that build on themselves, the stakes are real if fantastical, and there's just enough education mixed in that I feel like I'm learning. I would read hundreds of thousands of more words set in this version of the Pokemon universe if I could.
December 13, 2019
Wow! This fanfiction is pretty long, and clearly not over at all. 700k+words, so basically about 2000 pages.
I was not bored though. The progression is slower than I’d like, but the character development is really interesting and in-depth. (Look out for the interludes!)
4.5/5. I recommend this fanfiction to anyone vaguely interested in rationality or sanity or science-y things, and especially to anyone who knows anything about pokemons, because, at many times, the fights were hard or impossible to imagine since I didn’t know at all what the pokemons looked like, which ruined some moments for me.
Okay so basically it’s the story of Red, Blue and Leaf on a journey. Blue has this famous scientist dad, and Red likes science and especially biology (by extension, understanding species and their origins, hence the title) but Blue is interested in battling more, and leaf, it’s less set in stone in the beginning, but you’ll see soon enough.
There’s a lot of intrigue, and “manipulation”, like GoT kind, but less extreme obviously. The trio is pretty OP though, and sometimes one might wonder how incompetent everyone else seems compared to these kids (11-13, in that area). Like other rationalist fiction, it goes into many concept of rationality, in a manner reminiscent of HPMOR.
That’s all I had to say. I hope you’ll have as much fun reading this as I did, and that the story will speed up somewhat so that when you’re nearing the end, there’s not too many cliff hangers! Chapters 10k words long, at least, so that’s much longer than average.
I was not bored though. The progression is slower than I’d like, but the character development is really interesting and in-depth. (Look out for the interludes!)
4.5/5. I recommend this fanfiction to anyone vaguely interested in rationality or sanity or science-y things, and especially to anyone who knows anything about pokemons, because, at many times, the fights were hard or impossible to imagine since I didn’t know at all what the pokemons looked like, which ruined some moments for me.
Okay so basically it’s the story of Red, Blue and Leaf on a journey. Blue has this famous scientist dad, and Red likes science and especially biology (by extension, understanding species and their origins, hence the title) but Blue is interested in battling more, and leaf, it’s less set in stone in the beginning, but you’ll see soon enough.
There’s a lot of intrigue, and “manipulation”, like GoT kind, but less extreme obviously. The trio is pretty OP though, and sometimes one might wonder how incompetent everyone else seems compared to these kids (11-13, in that area). Like other rationalist fiction, it goes into many concept of rationality, in a manner reminiscent of HPMOR.
That’s all I had to say. I hope you’ll have as much fun reading this as I did, and that the story will speed up somewhat so that when you’re nearing the end, there’s not too many cliff hangers! Chapters 10k words long, at least, so that’s much longer than average.
July 7, 2019
An amazing, ongoing story! Really recommended for anybody who cares about logic and rationality.
May 19, 2024
DNF. It's an OK book, but I think it suffers greatly by comparison. Want exposition on Bayes? Read HPMOR. A lengthy book with a sense of impending doom, where every choice is pondered and explained? Worm. A lengthy book with a bunch of delving into the psychology of the protagonists? Twig. A lengthy book with a bunch of monsters? Pact. I feel like this one is just worse in every category than some other book, perhaps only leaving the hardcore pokemon fans satisfied. It doesn't help that the stakes feel like peanuts with just hints of them maybe getting bigger in a future chapter, but after 40% (so maybe 500 pages? 1000?) they didn't seem to get there.
I did enjoy the way the author makes the pokemon universe more gritty and realistic, I just wish it was in a more streamlined package with conflict I could care about instead of "which bike do I buy?".
I did enjoy the way the author makes the pokemon universe more gritty and realistic, I just wish it was in a more streamlined package with conflict I could care about instead of "which bike do I buy?".
April 10, 2019
Gud
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 2, 2019
I didn’t find this engaging at all. The main characters were pretty childish to me so perhaps it isn’t the reading level I’m looking for.
Dropped ch 9/70
Dropped ch 9/70
May 20, 2025
aquest fanfic perfecte
March 20, 2025
Poorly written and cringe
Dropped ch26
Dropped ch26
May 8, 2023
UPDATE 2023-05-08: Part 2 recently ended. The story keeps getting better, and while the review below (written about 30 chapters ago) stands as-is, I'm bumping my overall rating from 3 stars to 4.
This serial does many things very well, but unfortunately fails to integrate those things in a way that's consistently good. It effectively teaches Rationality 101 concepts through fiction (and has some good commentary on the sociology of science), but in an overtly didactic way that obstructs the storytelling, and initially makes it feel like the protagonists are only here to serve as soapboxes. It was kinda annoying when HPMoR did that in the first few chapters, and we didn't really need another ratfic doing it, especially when it's retreading much of the same ground.It has a gripping plot, starring Giovanni as the leader of a shadow government rather than a gang with vaguely nefarious intent, but that plot mostly gets developed in the interludes, with the nominal protagonists far away from all the interesting action, which makes for some frustrating pacing.
It does some impressive worldbuilding, fleshing out the skeleton that the handheld games provide (Eld ignores the manga and anime), and imposing some realism and internal consistency. This also creates an uncanny valley sort of effect, where the effort to make things make sense leaves the failures to make sense that much more obvious. Given conditions at the start of the story, there is internal consistency, but it's unclear how those starting conditions could have come to be. The influence of Worm is obvious: Eld's turned legendary Pokemon into Endbringers, more or less, which is an important plot point. The thing is, Earth Bet was a world on the verge of collapse, largely because of the Endbringers, which hadn't been around more than a couple decades, and that made perfect sense. Eld's legendaries are marginally less terrifying, but they're active seasonally, they've been around for ages, and they have the knock-on effect of causing stampedes of pokemon (which can commonly breathe fire, spew toxic gas, cause earthquakes, etc., and which sometimes stampede for other reasons)... and people somehow built up a high-tech, almost utopian society in their presence? This gets even weirder when you consider that there are other nations, some of which also have regularly rampaging kaiju, some of which have no kaiju, and some of which have kaiju that are less belligerent, and they're apparently all at comparable levels of economic development. Also, why does Bill, of all people, choose to live and work in kaiju central?
The good news is that the problems with characterization and plot are much ameliorated in book 2. By the time it starts (around 80 chapters in), the protagonists seem like actual characters, they've almost come into contact with the plot, and the stuff they're doing in the meantime is more interesting. It never quite stops being overtly didactic, but at least it moves on from Rat 101 to more interesting and original choices of subject matter. Where before, Eld would interrupt the plot to spend a whole chapter talking about Bayes's Theorem or psychological biases, now he'll interrupt the plot to spend a whole chapter talking about color theory or therapeutic techniques (which fits - Eld is a therapist). I do recommend it; just be prepared for a very slow burn.
August 13, 2024
I quit this giant Pokémon fic after Chapter 52, almost halfway through. There was a lot of good things about it, and I overall liked it, but there were enough infuriating flaws to get me to give it up. Besides the fact that this fanfic, like most every web serial, is way too long.
This fic revolves around three rationalist kids on their Pokémon journey trying to discover everything they could about Pokémon and be the best in their fields. It gave me great nostalgia for when I was an eleven-year old or thereabouts obsessed with Pokémon. But then the nostalgia factor wore off.
Sure, there’s a lot I really love about this fic. All of the headcanons about Pokémon and the Pokémon world, the chance to explore every bit of the universe, and the tension in the Pokémon battles and action scenes. But there are problems with this story that are inherent in both Pokémon and rationalist fiction, as well as things I just didn’t enjoy. I especially didn’t like how one of the main characters turned out to be psychic. Humans with psychic powers are an extremely marginal part of the Pokémon world that I only know from like two anime episodes. It was surprisingly boring to explore.
This isn’t my thing. I can understand everyone who would read all of this story and follow its updates, and love it for its best parts. However, the precocious kids (weirdly more realistic than the ones in the Pokémon anime) and the melodramatic, vaguely scripted emotional beats were too much to handle. It’s probably me and not the fic.
This fic revolves around three rationalist kids on their Pokémon journey trying to discover everything they could about Pokémon and be the best in their fields. It gave me great nostalgia for when I was an eleven-year old or thereabouts obsessed with Pokémon. But then the nostalgia factor wore off.
Sure, there’s a lot I really love about this fic. All of the headcanons about Pokémon and the Pokémon world, the chance to explore every bit of the universe, and the tension in the Pokémon battles and action scenes. But there are problems with this story that are inherent in both Pokémon and rationalist fiction, as well as things I just didn’t enjoy. I especially didn’t like how one of the main characters turned out to be psychic. Humans with psychic powers are an extremely marginal part of the Pokémon world that I only know from like two anime episodes. It was surprisingly boring to explore.
This isn’t my thing. I can understand everyone who would read all of this story and follow its updates, and love it for its best parts. However, the precocious kids (weirdly more realistic than the ones in the Pokémon anime) and the melodramatic, vaguely scripted emotional beats were too much to handle. It’s probably me and not the fic.
October 15, 2016
great book, but not complete
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews