YMMV / Boldores and Boomsticks

• Broken Base: One of the last scenes of Chapter 37 has Hala lecture Yang about being a hothead who only uses the Attack! Attack! Attack! fighting strategy because it works with her Semblance and never improving on it, due to Tapu Koko getting frustrated that Yang is taking his challenge for a good fight too lightly and isn't improving between challenges. How does Hala go about it? By disparaging the teachers who taught her how to use Aura and her Semblance (which includes her father) to get her riled up enough to challenge him to a fight, outmaneuvers her with his Old Master credentials as a Fighting-type Master to get her to listen to him, and then finally deconstructs her fighting style with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to illustrate that when her strength fails her, she has nothing left to fall back on, which then leads to her agreeing to train with him to fix that weakness. Reader response to the scene was divided; those who disapprove say that Hala seemed to be acting like an out of character Jerkass (choosing to go for insults and disparagement instead of calm talking and wisdom), that he was unjustifiably treating Yang as a dumb idiot, and that his approach to get Yang to listen with a show of force was completely counterintuitive and made him and the scene come off badly. Those that approve say that Hala was able to get Yang to fix a canon flaw in her fighting style without losing her arm in the process (and that she was being an idiot in challenging Tapu Koko with the same strategy every time), that he knew Yang well enough to know the right strategy to make her listen, and that he managed to stop her before she pushed what amounted to a fey war god too far, using whatever social means necessary to get through to her hot, hard head.
• Fridge Brilliance: Absol declaring Qrow her unofficial trainer makes far too much sense when you realize that the Pokédex says that Absol can sense disasters that are about to happen. Qrow's Misfortune semblance would be guaranteed to make any member of the species decide that he needs someone to look out for him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The author's explanation for where Ash is is that he's currently "off having adventures in whatever region suddenly always existed when Generation 8 comes out". Then, a few years later, Journeys aired which is about Ash and Goh traveling to different regions and some episodes have them going back to Alola!
  • The fight between Machoke and Yang in the Golden Fist Tournament ends when Machoke uses Counter on Yang's punch, only for her to use her semblance to counter the Counter and win the fight. Later on in Enter the Champion! Ash's Lycanroc strikes Gladion's Lycanroc with Accelrock and when Gladion's Lycanroc uses Counter, Ash's Lycanroc uses its own Counter to knock out Gladion's Lycanroc and win.
  • The fic's entire premise becomes this as of the finale of volume 8 of RWBY, where Team RWBY falls through a mysterious void to another world.
  • A Gyarados watching Yang beat down some Team Rocket goons muses that he didn't know there was a Fire-Type version of Outrage. Pokémon Legends: Arceus later added the move Raging Fury, which is just that.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The existence of Grendel, a Beowulf Alpha that's centuries old and is basically feared throughout all of Vale. 10 feet tall, lightning-fast and agile in a fight, able to easily predict and counter Team RWBY's attacks and beat them senseless (they only survive because he lets them live), and also intelligent, calculating, and patient, able to organize aimless mobs of bloodthirsty Grimm into a coherent fighting force that uses military-style tactics. He's known as "the Grimm General".
  • Faba's attempts to create a perfect Grimm-killing Pokemon were rather horrific, according to Gladion. The scientist has an entire room full of the corpses of the failed prototypes, and when Gladion discovered it, he was so disgusted he couldn't eat that night.
  • Faba releases the Grimm in the Aether enclosures and uses the Ultra Wormhole Generator to summon more in an attempt to kill everyone. The Grimm maim several people and kill some of them before Team RWBY and the others arrive. When Weiss tries to call him out on the damage he had done, he proves just how evil he is with this chilling line: "Yes, yes, death, destruction, and nothing of value was lost."
• The Woobie:
  • Lusamine might well qualify for this, even though she inadvertently makes things much worse for our heroes. Lusamine has spent decades running one of the largest charity organizations in the world, despite being fabulously wealthy in her own right. Unfortunately, the creatures of Grimm serve as a complete Outside-Context Problem, and in her efforts to extend her charity work to them, she ends up a complete Unwitting Pawn for the bad guys. Even though she's well-intentioned and one of the strongest Pokémon trainers in Alola, the number of named characters who have positive feelings about her could probably be counted on one hand. Salem and her subordinates are very amused at her gullibility. Team RWBY has no problems calling the entirety of the Aether Foundation idiots, because simply approaching a creature of Grimm without proper combat training would get you labelled Too Dumb to Live on Remnant, let alone protecting them. And most crushing of all to Lusamine, her own children independently decided that she'd gone insane, and left Aether Paradise rather than continue trying to reason with her. Lusamine is shown crying her eyes out in front of Faba, wondering what she had done to make her children leave her, while Lillie and Gladion both work on growing stronger so they can go up against their mother to bring her to her senses. This all culminates in the Siege of Aether Foundation when Faba betrays her after decades of friendship and unleashes the Grimm all through the complex, killing several of her employees and wounding dozens more. He mocks her to her face when she confronts him then sics the Grimm on her personally, nearly killing her before Lillie, RWBY and company arrived at the last possible moment. She's left despondent in the aftermath, buoyed only by the return of her children and fully expects to go to jail for everything that's happened.

---