I really love the intro paragraph. It reaches out and grabs onto you and doesn’t let there be any ambiguity as to what you’ll be presented with. I enjoy the way you use small bits of description to convey things about your subjects without having to say any of it outright. Giovanni just oozed presence, and if I tried to quote all the details that jumped out at me, we’d be here all day. (But a top contender would be the way that his smile didn’t reach his eyes until he was commanding others.) And of course, I really loved all the crushing self-hatred from Fuji throughout.

It’s fascinating—and illuminating—that Giovanni, in his pursuit to own the perfect being, actually wants the clone to have things that would make it harder to control: abstract thought, creativity, complex language. A mindless slave would be a more effective weapon, and yet, there’s almost something symbolic about it, in a way. He wants control over it specifically because it be the ultimate mark of control, to command something like that.

I was a little confused by the concerns over Mewtwo having a genetic donor, or rather, how that was framed. Now, I can certainly understand the concern that there potentially could be some sort of psychic bond (heck, it’s a thing in Pokespe so it easily fits under suspension of disbelief.) It’s the fact that he later he mentions that the clone would be bound to Giovanni by blood, like they know that means anything. Is this a known phenomenon to them?

Overall, the entire prologue has so much a better sense of *scope* than the previous one. I remember being so surprised when you first started hinting as how big this story was going to be, as I never got that feel from the old one, and had a hard time seeing how it fit. But here? Yeah, we’re in for a ride, I can tell~

Poor Salem

That was such a detailed descriptive starting chapter

So, at last I checked out this fic of yours and I must say this is a very promising prologue you've constructed starting with the birth or Mewtwo, the original hybrid.

Given I've already seen you talking about your research into Mewtwo, I must say you did a great job at adapting it to fit into your story. Seeing the banter between Giovanni and Fuji, and then Fuji and Auguste was pretty delightful. I must say you have a knack for crafting good dialogue and that much I can respect.

Seeing that this was where it all began, it'd be interesting to see how this one misguided experiment shaped the future of your story's world to the point where there's now going to be tons of hybrids running around potentially. Will the rest of humanity accept them or will they be met with scorn and enmity?

If anything, I'm now pumped to see where this story is going. I'm not sure how involved Mewtwo himself would be since Salem would be the pivotal focus moving forward. I can't wait to see how her story begins starting from next chapter hopefully.

I finally got around to reading your prologue
Fucking hell, that was one hell of a read
I am thrilled
Goddamn thrilled
You have exceeded my every expectation
This is FANTASTIC
My most particular moments of enjoyment were "use my DNA" and "What if we don't use Giovanni's DNA?"
Each time I reeled with great surprise!
I found myself totally compelled. This prelude is far superior to its predecessor
It makes me want to write again!
I think your writing in this prelude is phenomenal. I love it!

Wow! A stellar first chapter that had everything you need to start a story. Already the reader has been thrust into a world of intrigue, genetics, and personal tragedy. As a Pokemon fanfiction, Different Eyes is a clever and deeply human interpretation of the universe. I wasn't expecting the 'dittos' and the depth of characterisation for Giovanni - proving you have the confidence to both adapt and personalise the broad Pokemon concept.

Furthermore, you show real skill in developing the mood of your narrative, with changing and contrasting writing style adding both tone and topography to the text. The Cinnabar Island subsection was smooth and oddly melodic, with detailed characterisation balanced well with story progression and dialogue. Your use of language is extraordinary, with a depth to your narrative born from a clear understanding of vocabulary and context. I could only nitpick a few things. In some places I felt you needed an oxford comma, though that's purely personal taste. In the section where Giovanni and Fuji discussed DNA, there was a little confusion between who was speaking given the large blocks of speech.

At first I was uncertain about how your mixed real world and Pokemon locations, though I quickly adjusted. Given the complexity of the story, the references to such locations tie in well with the narrative. Such unexpected detail was also seen in the characterisation of Fuji with the inclusion of his own collapsed marriage and personal project regarding his sister. It’s otherwise off-hand information like this that adds a depth, as well as foreshadowing later developments in the story (something akin to Chekhov's gun). However, at some points such details added density to the text which made some paragraphs seem cumbersome.

The 'Conception' subsection showed interesting contrast to the rest of the chapter. Here the text shows a punchy sentence structure which adds a realism and strange apprehension for what is to come. However, in parts I felt your use of 'it' to describe Mewtwo became a little repetitive. Although, given Fuji’s personal connection, I can see how this may be purposeful. I also noticed a similar style when describing Auguste, where there was a little repetitive structure of he/hims when describing appearance.

Overall, this first chapter was a real pleasure to read. I very much look forward to later updates and seeing new uploaded material!

Zen

Different Eyes is a very decisive, endearing, and thoroughly enjoyable story. It takes the common fanfiction theme of transformation and tips it upside down, showing the point of view of a Pokémon fulfilling their dreams to become human.

The narrative is neatly constructed, foreshadowing later events in a way that is addictive to read. The author’s use of English is near perfect, with a natural fluidity to the story that makes each paragraph a joy to read. Sentence structure variation, as well as a clear pace to the narrative, brings the story to life. It was a real pleasure to read such a well-written story. Stellar job.

Salem the cat (the main protagonist) is characterized perfectly, the narrative portraying the head-strong individual seeking a new life. Emphasize on Salem’s past life provides added intrigue, with my only criticism at how little this has been explored. However, as her pervious life as a pet seems to be a major theme in the story, I expect more is to come! This fiction expertly balances considerations of backstories with narrative, as well as concise worldbuilding. The latter is highly commendable, with the language involving sign between people and Pokemon adding a real humanism to the latter. Although on the surface such details appear trivial, these snippets of information only help to add further to Salem’s wish for a new life.

It's hard to pick flaws in such a clearly written story. The plotline is unique and sets up a number of possible outcomes regarding Salem’s transformation. Themes such as what is means to be human, what differences exist between people and Pokémon, and the importance of language are all touched upon. I am very much looking forward where the author takes the story in the upcoming chapters – though I have a feeling Salem will be revisiting their past.

A stellar story and one which I will continue to follow with great interest!

Zen

Incredibly well written. Keep it up.

I'll do my best to try and summarize my feelings. Overall, I think this is a very impressive fic. Salem's curiosity and drive is heartwarming. I truly want her to succeed in her goal of becoming a morph. One that I find particularly impressive is how well you're balancing and exploring themes of humanity, empathy, and autonomy. Every character you've introduced adds something to our understanding of these themes, so no one feels superfluous. I know a lot of people like Jamie, but I find him frustrating. He completely ignored Salem's wishes. He made a decision for her without knowing enough about her situation. For all he knew she ran away from an abusive home. I'm glad Salem left and joined Alicia, and I don't blame her for abandoning her trainer either. Her life shouldn't end or begin with someone else. Her needs are just as important.

I also really love the addition of pokesign. You've put a lot of thought into this world and it shows. I'm looking forward to more!

You know already I follow this fic on serebii forums instead, but crossposting my review anyway ;)

So, finally got to read Ch4. I am going to be a tiny bit biased because we talk on discord and I already knew about the feedback this chapter got on bulbagarden forums, before I even started to read it.

Overall the chapter does feel a bit rushed. I blame the pressure to finally get to the poke morph business ASAP to be the reason.
Two points that specifically give the impression we are moving forward too fast:

1. We barely got the glimpse of this poke morph facility / research center, or how things work there and we are already moving on.

2. Salem's change seems too fast. She arrives and basically gets to morph into a different form of life - in place of breakfast. No waiting for her spot on the list? No medical exam to check if she is even eligable (diseases, potential biological and chemical reactions...)? No preparation and training phase for the 'transition?' Just go in, get changed? I kinda feels like Alisha is running some sort of elaborate con business (even if she clearly isn't, since we got to see other morphs).

I feel like these points alone deserve an extra chapter. After all, you did invest in Salem staying briefly in the shelter. And that one was actually less important place than Alisha's facility. If anything you could skip or cut the shelter part and use that extra space to tell us more about poke morph facility (personally i liked the shelter scenes tho, i would prefer to keep those and just give the Alisha's facility equal level of detail... however if you are worried about your story's pacing...).

*

On the other hand, Salem's eagerness and naivety match her character perfectly. I recall some reviewers criticizing her behavior in terms of not questioning Alisha, nodding to everything etc.
But that is what I would expect from a mature reasonable person (which is not what Salem is, at least for now). We have had the foreshadowing of Salem's naivety/immature take on life from the very start:

1. Escaping from Laura's place and barely acknowledging how this must have hurt her owner
2. Having over the top expectations (Becoming human will resolve all my problems! What could possibly go wrong?)
3. Trusting a stranger who basically offers a candy to her (and having no guarantees about what will happen to her once she leaves with them)

So, intentional or not I think Salem's naivety and eagerness are actually very much in character here. I expect her to wisen up a bit after she does get to morph and realizes not everything will be sunshine and rainbows ever after. So far she didnt have a reason for that because she is just after her dream atm.

That being said, you could do with at least a paragraph acknowledging this. Perhaps a brief moment where Salem realizes Alisha could be liar/kidnapper/con woman, and then quickly brushing it off because she is too excited about her dream coming true? That would show her as being naive or irresponsible, but not necessarily stupid (and in meta meaning, this would telegraph your audience that while Salem might be naive, you as an author are not since you thought of the possibility too).

*

I also have to commend you on the cat POV. Some other reviewers already commented on this - Salem does feel like a cat just from the way you write her. It also directly leads to most dialogue being "a human and a cat Pokemon." This makes your conversations stand out. Most of the time I see human and human or Pokemon and Pokemon in PMD. It leads to cute and unique moments like this:

[QUOTE]“You ready now, kitten? All decided?”
[YES!]
She signed so forcefully that she almost tripped herself in doing so. Alisha laughed to herself, and lead the way.
[/QUOTE][QUOTE]
"(...)Have you ever had those kind of thoughts, Salem?”
A soft rumbling showed her admission.
[/QUOTE]
I absolutely adore those. What a treat!

*

Anyway, those were my main points I wanted to mention. There one or two nitpicks I also have - we can talk about those on discord if you want to.

Great work and fun read despite my nitpicks! Looking forward to next chapter.

Jamie! Jamie is so friendly. And wholesome. Yay. I forgot to mention this in chapter one, but I like that you've got different patterned pokemon here; it feels a lot more realistic, and honestly most people can't tell a leopard from an ocelot, so that girl mixing up glameow and purrloin makes perfect sense.

[Conkeldurr boss, he says, please be nice now! Gave you strong stone! People say, you conkeldurr boss, not the boss of me! Forgetting strong stone gift!]
oh man this is one of those things that I feel horrible for laughing at, isn't it. please be nice now

Me being a bad person aside, I like this note that you're introducing early: Salem wants to be a person. People are also not great. Laura abandoned Salem; these humans are not great to the conkeldurr. There's a nice complexity that you're starting to play with here that's really exciting!

more general thoughts?

My one qualm would be that things feel very much the same as the first chapter, even though emotionally the arcs should've progressed a lot further than that. I think this might be a result of your narrative choice to tell the story in jumps: conveying the passage of time is tricky. Where it fell a (just a tiny bit) short for me here was that Salem doesn't feel any different from whatever events have transpired between the first chapter and now.

Which may be your point! It's a little weird to try to sketch out an entire character arc in five thousand words as a prelude for what is presumably another character arc, but these chapters are tricky from a reading perspective because we're working toward a foregone conclusion until the actual morphing scene. Or I guess, in different words: we/you know that Salem is a cat who wants to be a human, and we/you know that these are events that will take her to this goal, so when she starts off pretty much already there, there's a lot less story left for you to tell. The emotional arc is already written, and the plot arc is set in stone slightly, so you lose the benefit of the story kind of unfolding/telling itself. It's kind of a story that's being told by the strength of its worldbuilding/narration alone at this point, which is far from outright bad, just a little strange.

...I hope this makes sense. This is vague thoughts I have on how foregone conclusions (and some prequels) are approached in media that I've never really had reason to write up formally before, but I think they're applicable here. Let me know if I need to elaborate/if anything here was toooooo abstract; I was trying not to drop a thesis on you while juggling actual information here.

Overall I'm digging the read so far; the complaints I have are pretty minor in the grand scheme of how well this is written. Especially the realism and lack of everyone being on fire and evil and shit. Thank you for writing and looking forward to seeing more!

hey hey sorry I've been afk for quite a while I'll get back to you :(

[[BAD HUNTER.] An accusation.

She replied with mirrored gestures and a turn of the head. [NOT HUNTING.]

A brief, shrill chirrup, a certain blink: [YES, THAT’S IT.] By this he meant, “exactly, a good hunter would be hunting right now.”]
oh my god the subtle burns here. thank you.

[“Salem, huh? Good name for a black cat, I guess. Or black-white-and-tan, close enough. A witch’s cat, named for a town of witches.”]
Salem didn’t really understand, but those were definitely colour words. He was describing her for some reason. She flicked both ears back and forth as she ate. [OKAY.]
dropped a double-spacing here

While Salem peeked inside out of simple curiosity, a fluffy white rockruff spotted her, and was immediately wagging their tail and perking their ears.
Normally (as a non-cat owner who mostly learns about cats from the internet), you've got me sold on this as realistic catlike behavior/establishing Salem as a clear non-human narrator, but I'm wondering why you had Salem scenting the mienshao's gender later but not here? Animals are actually pretty good at recognizing genders almost instantly from scent because it's so critical to a lot of their socializing/territorializing/mating/interacting, so idk if it's a matter of first impressions or an overreliance on visual descriptors when this would actually be a great opportunity to explore the non-human sensory things that Salem has here (and will later lose)? Unless this is actually deeper commentary on how pokemon are sapient and transcend genders and pronouns, and it's just humans who need to assign labels on them, in which case lmao I suck.
microcrit amirite

This chapter is equally sweet; you've got the character interactions and details down pat, so I'm not sure what exactly to comment on in that regard except that they were nice to read. I appreciate portrayal of a happy, wholesome shelter with actually friendly residents-it takes out the unneeded additional conflict about teh evil orphanage runners and lets you focus more on Salem's inner monologue.

]she was a feline pokémon - a purrloin - and she would have to resort to using a pokémon shelter]
Quick grammar thing, you actually want to use em dashes (—; if this gets eaten in the review formatter, it's basically a double-long - hyphen) instead of hyphens (-) here. Hyphens are used to join two words together, like lickety-split; em dashes are used to indicate breaks in sentences-and sometimes to join two ideas together. (Their middle sibling, the en dash, is used to indicate spans of time, such as 1992 – 1996).

And so we see our protagonist! I like Salem a lot. You do an awesome job of sketching out her goals/motivations; she’s a pokemon who wants to be human (which, from the premise, we know she’ll achieve), but she also wants to be cared for and loved (which is more up in the air). You do a great job of capturing her more catlike behaviors here (clinging to the taste of chicken in jelly, getting distracted by string, spitefully curling up under a bush and never dreaming of Laura. Oof.). There’s a lot going on with this little fsr here, but I like that you’re laying down who she was; that’s hella important.

The tone here is really sweet, too. You lay out Laura and Salem’s interactions really well, with just enough reminders for us to see that it ended in the only way it realistically could’ve. Sentience debates aside, I like the worldbuilding you introduce with pokesign; it’s a clever way at getting multi species communication in a manageable fashion. And pour one out for all the voltorb of the world. :’)

Lovely read so far. I was expecting grim sci-fi and instead got fluffy slice of life; I’m actually quite happy with this mixup. The little details are what sold me, I think. Awesome stuff!

[This perspective is unsupported by modern research, but it persists nonetheless, perhaps because people are uncomfortable believing otherwise.]
Oh man. Starting off with some easy topics, right? I like this direction, though. Morphs are always a neat way to study humanity and what we ascribe as monstrous or human-like; tying in the debate of pokemon sentience seems like a logical (and yet usually ignored) leap. I’m not entirely sold on the handwave for “people feeling uncomfortable” if fully sentient pokemon are commonplace in the world, though? Does training still exist? How do we approach the concept of ownership in this world?

Laura could plausibly see and not be unnerved that Salem enjoys reading about anthropology and misses her when she’s gone and has a favorite food; these aren’t traits that we see as signs of sentience. But total communication/language? There’s literally no room to be uncomfortable; the pokemon can tell you exactly what they want, and I dunno if it would be “let me get beat up so you can get some metal trinkets from that guy.” Knowing you, there’s probably something deeper afoot. Looking forward to seeing it!

The rest of this prelude is wonderfully written. It’s informative without being too expository; it’s clinical in a way that makes me uncomfortable but also unsure if it’s trying to be sinister or not. There’s a lot of things answered here but you’ve left me asking a lotta questions, which I found delightful. For a short prelude, this does the job admirably!

Really liked the added interaction with the shelter staff and the shelter pokemon in this chapter; made the shelter feel more like a real place instead of a single scene leading to the main plot. Also approve of the Throh and Chatot storyteller pair, both for their Themness and that nobody ever fuckin remembers Throh and Sawk... myself included. And your writing style continues to be strangely entrancing, so, very much approve of this chapter!