YMMV / Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail

YMMV Tropes with Their Own Pages

• Alternate Character Interpretation
• Anvilicious
• Harsher In Hindsight
• Hilarious In Hindsight
• Informed Wrongness

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A-D

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Anger Is Not Enough, no matter how much one tries to say or confirm it otherwise, and trying to hold onto that belief will only make things worse for everyone.
  • While inactivity causes more trouble than it's worth, proactivity can be just as damaging, if not even more so.
  • Catharsis is not the same as proper punishment. Sometimes, you can't have both without making things worse.
  • Sometimes, people just don't know how to forgive someone.
  • Calling people out may feel good at first, but overusing it is very easy to do and will ultimately do nothing to change the situation.
  • If you don't speak up, people won't hear you and/or they will make their own assumptions.
  • Don't push what you want onto someone. If you want something, then get it yourself.
• Angst Aversion: The story can be quite brutal with its drama: not only do you have Chloe being the biggest woobie this side of the Pokémon World, but once she leaves, crap hits the fan as everybody blames themselves for her disappearance. And this is without mentioning the mountain heaps of wangst of Blame Game one has to sit through before things get any better If you're interested in reading this story, you better brace yourself.
• Angst Dissonance: Chloe suffers from this from many fans, who find many of her problems either entirely from her own delusions (with Ash as the most prominent examples) or self-inflicted (most of her problems with her parents) and consider her more a victim of self-sabotage than a victim of society.
• Anticlimax Boss: Mrs. Turner is quite a sad Final Boss and Arc Villain compared to the likes of (motive-wise) Parker, Sara, Yeardley and Class 5-E and (power-wise) Henry and Walter, The Apex and The Unown and UnChloe, especially since she's the last enemy faced in the story, period. While initially a Mundanger threat, all of that goes straight out the window when she reveals herself to be just as cartoonishly evil as the antagonists of Act 1, with very little nuance or depth to her character. Despite having a gun, her threat level is also vastly inferior to previous antagonists, with the only thing setting her apart being her bluffs. When someone tries to call those bluffs, she gets a big Villainous Breakdown that reduces her to a maniac with an itchy trigger finger. Not only that, but her plan would've been outright doomed from the start had it not been for the Mew she has holding onto the Distress Ball perpetually for her entire appearance; does this sound familiar by any chance?
• Arc Fatigue:
  • Even taking the story's slow burn status into account, some people think that Chloe's Character Development takes a bit too long. She enters the Train a spiteful girl with anger issues towards everyone back home, stays much the same way through Act 1 and the start of Act 2, and while "The Cyan Desert Car" makes her realize she has to change, it takes until "The Carnevil Car" for her to take steps into doing that. Not helping matters is the fact that Chloe spends most of the slow burn willingly pushing people away, performing questionable actions, and acting so spiteful and angry that it becomes hard to watch.
  • Likewise, one could say the Pokemon World bits take a little too long to get going. Most of Act 1 is centered around people realizing how they "mistreated" Chloe and either feeling sorry for themselves, blaming themselves, or pointing fingers at those they believe are at fault. This barely changes in Act 2, with it reaching its zenith with the Unown incident. It's only during Act 3, near the end of the story, where things actually start changing for the better, if not at all.
• Ass Pull:
  • Miss April's ability to read the room being tainted because she's leaving an abusive boyfriend can come across like this, because it kinda popped out of nowhere and had little to no Foreshadowing prior to the reveal of her nearly committing suicide.
  • During the courtroom scene, it turns out that the paint can incident was filmed on camera. How filmed evidence of someone getting bullied was not posted on the Internet and thus revealed to the Pokemon World (or at the very least, the recorder showing it to someone.) earlier in the story is anybody's guess.
  • The reveal in the Cyan Desert Car that Chloe actually DID want to be friends with Ash, despite the fact that she never expressed any prior indication that she ever wanted his friendship at all, and made it very clear she wanted him out of her life for existing. It's also implied that even if Ash had done more to make her try, she still would've refused out of personal dislike for him.
  • Goh having a note to remind him about the curry promise not only comes out of nowhere, but feels like a kick in the teeth, since not only does it come after Goh has been through his horrible nightmare therapy, but the only way it could've worked is if nobody in his house would've found it until that moment.
• Broken Base:
  • One part of the ending. Specifically, when Chloe’s Moment of Weakness upon seeing Mew leads to Delia’s Moment of Weakness rant against Chloe, causing Delia to leave Goh alone, giving him enough time to board the Infinity Train. Supporters say that this is a good Aesop and realistic, that even good people with valid criticism can take their arguments too far or argue at the wrong time. They also note that, as the person who knows the least about Goh in this situation, Delia would be the most likely to make this mistake. Detractors argue that this feels less like an ending for this story and more like an extended prologue for the next one, and also that getting Goh on the train didn’t need to involve throwing Delia under the bus, with some feeling like the author had Delia act out-of-character unnecessarily to get the sequel started. Finally, they noted that creating this scenario where the only major character left with significant criticisms against Chloe plays one last round of the Blame Game and later has to apologize means that the author has managed to make Chloe Unintentionally Unsympathetic for the entire story in one way or another.
  • Goh's "nightmare therapy" and its aftermath. While everyone agrees it was horrible and that Parker went too far, supporters argue that it was a Necessary Evil to get Goh to learn his lesson and for Chloe and Parker to see that their actions had consequences, while detractors argue that it was way too overkill even for this story and that it's the point where some readers quit the story altogether.
  • While everybody agrees Parker was punished for his actions, whether he was punished enough is a different story. Some believe that becoming Persona Non Grata in Vermillion City and not being allowed to become a Trainer for years is an appropriate punishment. Others believe he's getting off too easy for effectively mind-raping an entire city into a sadistic hellscape for his own satisfaction. A third group, meanwhile, believes that regardless of whether he was punished enough or not, the narrative continuing to hold his hand in his trial didn't help matters.
  • How much Chloe is responsible for the events of the story in Vermillion City when she is on the Infinity Train. Depending on the fan asked, this can vary from everything to only very specific things and every point in between. This divide in turn affects the viewpoints of several characters: the fans who take issue with Delia's low opinion of Chloe tend to be ones that think she isn't responsible for Parker's actions.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Chapter 19 has Chloe revealing what she wants from Ash, his friendship, and wants to try again and especially when Ash reciprocates despite everything happening with Parker, giving fans a sense of relief as the blame game finally not only slowed down, but clearly reversed.
  • Chapter 20 has UnChloe defeated. He also gets to slap [[spoiler: Parker for all the terrible shit he got to in the last few chapters.
  • Chapter 23 has Delia and Talia confront both Parker and Chloe about their actions, finally putting an end to their moral grandstanding and have Chloe fully shed the bulk of her complexes and truly resolve to be better.
• Designated Hero: While initially sympathetic, Chloe Cerise quickly becomes controversial once she boards the Train. Not only is she joyfully oblivious of the panic going back at home, but when she does find out, she relishes in it and cruelly refuses to let anybody know she's okay, even Goh, who constantly calls her only for her to tell him she wants nothing to do with him. She also blames things on everybody else while refusing to see her own role in everything, to the point she's perfectly willing to return to the Train if Vermillion City isn't up to her liking. To add insult to injury, while she does grow more confident during her stay at the Train, she only does something about her Never My Fault tendencies after her mother calls her out for it, which only happens after the fiasco of Act 2, a fiasco that can be traced back to her and a poorly worded message on her part.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Chloe's attention-seeking ways, emotional instability, and tendency to overplay certain events bring to mind Histrionic Personality Disorder.
  • Parker has untreated anger issues, a propensity towards violence, and inability to accept his own faults.
  • While she may just be very spoiled, Sara in particular displays some traits that imply there's something not quite right with her. She's a compulsive liar, is frighteningly skilled at manipulating those around her and has no qualms about using them as pawns, shows a clear Lack of Empathy, and is completely obsessed with destroying another person's life.
• Don't Shoot the Message:
  • Later in the story, it begins deconstructing the Accusation Fic tropes by pointing out how things aren't so black and white, Disproportionate Retribution is not acceptable, and those who subscribe to the idea are going to be called out on it. This is a decent message...unless Parker is involved. He acts much the same way as the protagonist of an Accusation Fic: blames everybody, sees things as black and white, and believes only in justice with extreme prejudice. However, instead of being called out, people keep praising him over how he knew Chloe better than anyone else while doing little to nothing to curb his violent tendencies. Even when he gets his just desserts after the Unown incident, the narrative still coddles him by giving him many moments where he acts like he did nothing wrong, culminating in a courtroom scene where he devolves into Shaming the Mob, all while acting like he's the better man in the situation.
  • There is a gem of truth in the idea that focusing too much on one part of the Pokemon world, the Pokemon themselves, can neglect the idea of human interactions and the wider world itself. It is a world of both humans and Pokemon after all. Chloe and the story of Blossoming Trail is interested in raising this point, the problem is that it fails to truly demonstrate the idea. Not only are many of the human characters involved genuinely growing thanks to their interactions with Pokemon, but many of the human interactions they are said to be missing out on due to obsession are genuinely negative (such as Goh's school) or accidentally written as such (as would be the case with Trip and Parker), making the message come off as tone deaf at best and bending over backwards to support Chloe's views at worst. Goh himself, who is arguably the most set up to explore this, is also less effective than he might have been by the story starting twenty-eight episodes into the series, by which point Goh has started to work away from a possible obsession to the point of missing out on other things already, meaning the story's best candidate for this concept had already started to improve on his own. The possible counter-message, that being too obsessed with the human half of the Pokemon world is just as bad and that people need balance between the two, which could be easily fulfilled by Chloe or Parker, is also poorly, if at all, explored.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • UnChloe is a monstrous version of Chloe created by the Unown and based on Parker's desires to get justice in the name of his older sister. She appears in various terrifying visages to anyone who isn't Parker, tortures and mind rapes people in horrible ways, and is on a collision course with creating a living nightmare in Vermillion City. She is living nightmare fuel to a dozen characters in the story (Ash, Trip, Serena, Professor Cerise, Mimey, Pikachu, Sara, Yeardley, Renji, Cryssa, Spencer, Molly) if not more who are less focused on. And yet fans consider her awesome and heroic and an avatar of just desserts. Then she loses the pants after Chapters 19 and 20 show her true colors.
  • Zeno is well-liked by many fans for his interesting concept and unique presentation, but he was introduced as a villain, with him making Goh's nightmare therapy as sadistic and unhelpful as possible, on purpose. Some fans tend to forget that, even though Zeno did perform a Heel–Face Turn, He's still the main culprit behind Goh becoming so broken he had to be sent to a suicide ward. Even if Parker's the one behind his creation, what he purposefully did was pretty bad.

E-I

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Franklin, a student from Class 5-E, became popular and sympathetic to the readers since he is the only student who didn't get involved with the bullying (because of his Asperger's syndrome).
  • Akemi Tsutsuji became a very endearing character with the fanbase even though she doesn't play a big role. Barring how she accidentally kickstarted the plot in the first place, she's a sweet girl and the only student at the school who genuinely wanted to be friends with Chloe. She even has her own spin-off story where she chases after Chloe onto the Train.
• Friendly Fandoms: Readers of Blossoming Trail also leave comments on Infinity Train: Boiling Point due to the latter being inspired by Blossoming Trail and Green Phantom Queen herself leaving comments, to the point that fans are excited for a possible encounter between Chloe and Boscha (as an alternate version of Chloe Cerise is shown in that fanfic). The author of Boiling Point has made multiple What If? stories of different characters entering the Train after Chloe while Green Phantom Queen returned in full with a prequel to Boiling Point where said story's Chloe of the Vermillion encountered Lexi.
• Growing the Beard: While Act 1 was good, it was a very by-the-numbers mix between a Revenge Fic and Accusation Fic, with Chloe's questionable attitude not helping things in the slightest. Act 2 begins not only deconstructing everything about the story, including its very premise, but also made Chloe's earlier actions come back to bite her in the butt, forcing her to become a proper hero if she wishes to be accepted again.
• Informed Wrongness:
  • A frequent issue when Ash is called out for not getting to know Chloe is that the story basically treats the idea of his asking her to do things with them beyond the first idea offered as basic decency and not, say, harassment. In general, a lot of the complaints Ash is given by the narrative and some readership can be boiled down to him not knowing things people were not telling him or knowing to ask about^note barring asking Goh in Episode 11 who just answered, "She just stopped liking them one day", or acting as if it's his job to be friends with everyone. Arc 2 changes this by showing Trip realizing he just made Ash harbor a Guilt Complex and is now working on telling Ash that it's not his fault this happened.
  • Despite being a Pokémon fanfiction, there is a definite theme in this story of portraying enthusiasm for Pokémon as somewhat unhealthy. Granted, in most of those cases it's implied that the issue is becoming obsessive over the topic, but that explanation doesn't always quite work. Even by the final chapter, there's some narration implying that pursuing a dream in Pokémon research or training comes at a cost of one's social skills or ability to appreciate the world. Goh is left wondering about all the opportunities he missed out on by focusing on Pokémon instead of the scenery, for example. This comes across as quite odd, considering the source material places quite a bit of importance on The Power of Friendship, and The World Is Just Awesome is a major theme. Plus, the threshold for considering an expertise in Pokémon an "obsession" seems quite a bit lower than expertise in other areas of knowledge, such as mythology, music, or horror. Coincidentally, these all happen to be topics that Chloe is quite invested in.
  • Not being into horror is treated as a problem. Someone like Renji, who doesn't like it, is frequently criticized for it, while anyone who says that Chloe should be into Pokémon is demonized in the story.
  • Flak is given to Ash for not offering up any of his alternate adventures to Chloe as stories and how she'd have really liked that. Beyond the fact that Ash doesn't casually do that to begin with, and later parts of the story even have Ash give a valid reason for not doing this because he doesn't want to be befriended for stuff like that where people would want to know him for crazy stuff and not who he is, it basically boils down to acting as if Ash is inconsiderate for not offering up every detail of his life's history to someone who he not only doesn't know better, but wasn't particularly open to him in the first place.

J-S

• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: In contrast to The Apex, Cage of Flauros, or Ms. Turner, who all at least had sympathetic motives and/or were entertaining to watch, Parker possesses no such traits, being an unhelpful brat with a dangerously volatile temper, who never takes responsibility for his actions and enjoys hurting people to feel good about himself.
• Just Here for Godzilla: As the story is divided into two segments (one starring Chloe and on the Infinity Train and another in the Pokémon World with Ash, Goh, and the others), some readers only read one segment of the story (either the Infinity Train parts or the Pokémon parts) and generally skip over the other one.
• Karmic Overkill: One of the biggest complaints about the story, shared by fans and detractors alike, is the sheer lengths the universe goes to punish Goh for a relatively minor offense: he searches for Chloe for days on end, growing sick with worry, only to be told to his face she wants nothing to do with him when they eventually do talk. Then, he becomes Vermillion City's personal scapegoat, with everybody pointing fingers at him and blaming him for what happened, never even bothering to see past the cookie cutter reality. Then he reaches a breaking point in Act 2, when Parker subjects him to the mother of all nightmares claiming he wants to help him, but really only wanting to hurt him and make himself feel better because of it, leaving Goh a shell of his former self with nary a hint of sanity left. Then, just as he's recovering from the previous event, he gets kidnapped by a lunatic who wants to use his Mew Tracker to get a Shiny Mew, with them even giving him an injured Mew as leverage, all while holding him at gunpoint. The punishments eventually get so ridiculous that the question of whether Goh brought this upon himself or not becomes a moot point.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Act 2 has Atticus gain a medal that will allow him to revive someone from near death, and the trio decide to use it on Tuba if need be. Of course, anybody who watches Infinity Train would know Tuba's too selfless to take it, and when Chloe comes close to kicking the bucket alongside her, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what's gonna come next.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Even before Simon decided to murder Tuba, he tore Lexi's pages off and buried him within the confines of his own car, which is the equivalent of crippling a child and shoving them into a grave. And both he and Grace relished the Dramatic Irony of his father being unaware that Lexi never even made it out of their car. This is also not counting the other atrocities that he's committed over the years or how he wants to hurt the Red Lotus Trio when they finally meet before he decides that he doesn't care that many of the denizens he killed were once humans and decides to become the embodiment of Destruction where he murders Chloe and Tuba out of sheer spite.
  • Sara essentially skipped past this when she and the class inflicted a Carrie-esque punishment on Chloe; even having been scared to death by a red-paint covered Chloe wasn't enough to get the message that bullying her is a dumb idea.
  • UnChloe pretty much skipped across this when she decides to torture every single one of Chloe's classmates in front of Miss April, or perhaps it was when she threatened to skin Ash alive to the real Chloe.
  • Walter and Henry cross it when they tortured Paul into Despair, gaslighting him to believe it's his fault for murdering Sean.
  • Ms. Turner crossed it either when she revealed she critically injured Mew.
• Narm: Chloe and Parker's speeches have a tendency to fall into this when they aren't heartbreaking or chilling. Both siblings can get so worked up at the people who have wronged them that their attempts at cutting remarks become a little ridiculous.
• Offending the Creator's Own: Author's Notes regarding the creation of Franklin Borage reveal at least one of the co-writers, Cross, is neurodivergent, but all this does is make the story's ableistic tones and Goh's harsh treatment, Goh himself heavily resembling a neurodivergent person, even more offensive and insulting than they already are.
• Ron the Death Eater: Delia Ketchum doesn't like Chloe Cerise. The reasons are fairly understandable in the text: Delia's seen how Chloe's (in)actions have made those around her miserable, up to and including her son having nightmares so bad she thinks he's about to have a seizure. To some readers, Delia spends all her time ranting and raving about Chloe and how she deserves death, when in reality Delia has many scenes where Chloe rarely comes up, if at all, and they ignore her legitimate reasons not to want the girl in her life.
• The Scrappy: Of all the characters in the story who were meant to be hated or accidentally became unlikeable, no one is as hated as Parker Cerise. While he started as a fairly typically divisive character who had his defenders and detractors, he truly fell into the pool of the hated during the Cyan Desert Arc and especially afterwards where his act of villainy and especially how he was handled after that left him a character that many saw as lacking remorse, subject to needless soft-handedness and shilling, and otherwise the one villainous character in the story to not get proper punishment for their actions. Even after he was written out, any mention of Parker draws in anger from the readership who request a desire to see him hurt and his focus chapter in Branching Paths got far fewer responses than Chloe's, Ash's, or Goh's.
• Shocking Moments: Many readers were shocked over Trip confessing his love for Ash and then even more so when Trip kisses Ash on the lips in the following chapter with Ash reciprocating the feelings and deciding he wants to "get together" with Trip.

T-W

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Despite being the reason the story even exists, Yeardley's rather underutilized. With his enhanced prominence, he could've been The Lancer to Chloe, and come to terms with the fact that the girl he bullied was more amazing than he thought, maybe even redeeming himself by trying to fix his mistakes. But no, he's reduced to nothing more than a misogynistic bully who gets no development, and is constantly used as a punching bag. He does redeem himself in the penultimate chapter, sacrificing himself so that Chloe can get the gun out of Ms. Turner's hand and the two reconcile at the hospital. And Voyage of Wisteria shows that there is a chance for him to work on his mistakes and become a better person. But for Blossoming Trail specifically, he's underutilized.
  • Talia Cerise is hit with the short end of the stick out of the whole Cerise family. While her husband gets to realize how negligent he was, her daughter's the main character, and her son becomes the Big Bad of Act 2, Talia... doesn't really do anything on her own, she either does things everybody else does (call out those who neglected Chloe) or serve as a setup for things to go worse (the drawing she made for Parker). It takes until near the end of Act 2 before she gets any sort of focus beyond just being the Useless Bystander Parent of the Cerises.
  • The Apex as a whole are underutilized. In Spite of a Nail called the Red Lotus Trio, their plotline is practically identical to the one in Book 3: Simon and Grace meet Hazel, her true nature's revealed, Grace grows empathetic while Simon turns into an asshole, about the only real new thing done with them is that people other than Amelia call them out on their quest, but by the time the story reaches the Fog Car, it has already used up the dictionary of lash outs at least twice, making it come across as completely redundant. The Apex reveal themselves to be absolutely apathetic when Chloe and Tuba died and nearly killed Hazel. And unlike in canon, the Apex splits apart after Grace reveals the entire truth and how much she messed up.
    • Hazel and Tuba are pretty much the same deal, as their storyline barely even changes despite the Red Lotus Trio's existence. At the very least, Hazel gets to leave with the Quarto on better terms with Grace than in the show and Tuba's death is much more honorable than in canon.
  • Renji and Chryssa probably could've related with Chloe back when she was home, since they've been given nothing to do in the lab since the story started. Despite being the Professor's assistants, and thus a potential source of a break from all the blaming, their only purpose in the story is to sit around, look pretty, and be yet another group of people who get blamed for everything that happened. While Renji's a little less wasted, since he knew Chloe liked horror, this is only used as fuel to blame him further.
  • Serena at times feels like an afterthought, since besides reacting to Ash and Trip getting together and a very short-lived set of interactions with Parker, she doesn't really do that much in the story.
  • Despite the story taking place in Vermillion City, and the gym leader of said city having a well-known connection to Ash, the Lightning Lieutenant Surge doesn't appear in any capacity, shape, or form, his canon absence as established in Journeys still in effect.
  • Trip is a weird case in that, while some people agree he was wasted, when was he wasted is the question. Some believe that he became wasted after the events of the Unown incident and him getting together with Ash, where he was Demoted to Satellite Love Interest with his no longer being into Pokemon battling leaving him very little to do after the fact. Others think he was wasted from the very beginning, where he performed very questionable actions in trying to explain what the Train was to everyone, with his brutal honesty only further aggravating the situation. Regardless, people agree he could've been used better.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Once Chloe goes missing, an #EngineeredHashtag movement is created to provide support for people like her. This could've been an easy way to put some focus on characters of the day, or even explore the Pokémon world outside of the critters. However, just as soon as it's introduced, it's left on the backburner for a 24-hour marathon of the Blame Game, and the next time we hear about it, it's in shambles thanks to Act 2's fiasco.
  • Ash and Trip becoming a couple could've worked, but it comes so suddenly and at such a bad time (after Trip had treated Ash badly) that it comes across as poorly executed and rather tasteless.
  • With Chloe gone, Parker starts interacting with Serena, whose kind and calm nature remind him of his sister. This could've been a perfect moment for Parker to get someone to confide in and vent, especially after being Chloe's confidant for so long, and it could've helped him deal with his issues. Instead, him going mad with power and pointlessly adding Serena to the list of people he'll torture with the Unown dashes that idea immediately.
  • Professor Cerise and Professor Hale working on a project together could've been a great moment to focus on the professor, and hopefully stop throwing blame at his face for once. Unfortunately, this idea is only used as a setup for the fiasco of Act 2.
  • Sara and Yeardley being forced to "intern" at Cerise Institute could've been a good way to give them some development, and actually get them to see that Chloe's life wasn't as glamorous as they thought. Unfortunately, they don't stay there for long before Parker goes apeshit and unleashes the Unown.
  • Deceased Passengers reincarnating as Denizens is an interesting plot point, but after it comes up, we only see it in action twice: The Curry Prince, and The Phantom of Toluca Lake. The potential third time, when Chloe dies, is averted before it happens because it was foreshadowed way earlier so that it wouldn't take, and in general, it feels like the reveal was made just to add some artificial tension.
  • One of the many things that Chloe angsts about is how she's Not Like Other Girls and feels like she needs to conform to be accepted. Goh goes through pretty much the same thing in Vermillion City: everybody basically tells him that if he had conformed and done what everybody else does, things would've been better. This could've been a perfect way to show to Chloe and Goh that their situations are more similar and nowhere near as mutually exclusive as they think. Instead, the story immediately gives Chloe a way to develop away from this need to conform, while Goh keeps having it drilled into his mind that he must be normal if things are to go okay, and neither party learns of the other's situation until after the damage is done.
  • A comment in an unrelated story poised by Cross suggests the potential idea of either Serena or Mallow taking Trip's place in canon. The former would not only help with Serena's lack of focus in canon but bring some levity to a pretty intense story, while the latter could've brought the Infinity Train to light at a much smoother pace, given her history as a former Passenger.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This is a complaint some readers throw at the story; the sheer amount of pain and misery the characters go through, coupled with the questionable behavior of the heroes and seemingly everyone taking a level in jerkass, dumbass, or both, some readers outright give up on the universe because there's only so much darkness everybody can take.
• Uncertain Audience: The fic, while not without an audience, does hit some very tricky roadbumps to widespread popularity. Not only does it have Betrayal Fic elements that can repel a lot of readers, it also manages to cause problems for those who do like the genre because the character that normally is the protagonist of such stories in the franchise, Ash, is not the protagonist and is in fact one of the ones that fuels the Betrayal Fic end of the setting while also playing with and critiquing betrayal elements enough to alienate the fans of the genre further. And if you're a Pokémon fan, you're likely gonna be alienated as well due to the fact the Pokémon World section of the story spends the majority of the time playing the Blame Game, and generally painting those who like Pokémon in a negative light.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Word of God is that Goh is a deeply selfish and uncaring individual who holds the most responsibility for Chloe running away, and his efforts to fix things are wrongheaded and shallow. But his guilt and self-loathing come off as a little too genuine, and his fragile mental state (before, during, and after his Trauma Conga Line) makes the prospect of Chloe completely rejecting his friendship, something that the story insists is her right, seem more like a cruel Break the Cutie than anything cathartic or deserved. The Intermission attempted to amended that somewhat with Goh sorely in denial about what Chloe actually wants from him, but not everyone felt that it was sufficient. Arc 2 made the amendment much better by making it clear that Goh's problems have gone beyond Chloe and him, making him reach the intended sympathy level for many readers (as in, little to none). Then, a combination of Parker's "nightmare therapy" backfiring, his stay at a suicide ward, and his kidnapping made him truly sympathetic. And all of this ignores the fact that Chloe is not blameless in their deteriorating friendship.
  • Ash is already treated by the narrative as sympathetic compared to Goh or Professor Cerise, but a sizeable and very loud group of readers and critics of the story consider the treatment the story gives him to be unwarranted. These readers consider the berating of Ash for being on one end of a communications failure to a point of him developing a guilt complex to be entirely unfitting of the "crime". These readers also tend to be a lot less sympathetic to Chloe because to them, Ash is essentially being blamed for both their parts of Poor Communication Kills.
  • While the narrative frames Delia as being in the wrong during her argument with Ash, more than a few reviewers, and at least one co-writer, see Delia's disinterest in forgiving Chloe as her own choice that isn't being respected and think that the choices of words Ash uses, such as comparing her to Parker despite a demonstratively different approach to her views of guilt and blame, are uncalled for.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • While Chloe's reasons for not expressing her own interests and hobbies are understandable and sympathetic, namely that she was bullied for her differences, the fact that she deliberately stonewalled efforts to get to know her better makes her subsequent complaints that nobody ever bothered to try seem somewhat self-defeating. It is very easy to see her as being at fault for several key aspects of the poor communication that drives the story. Initially, the narrative is heavily slanted in her side, defending her anger at Goh, Ash, her father and others even when she's clearly in the wrong. This eventually leads into the series heavily deconstructing the very concept of an Accusation Fic, delving into the Double Standards on all sides.
  • While Ash is normally sympathetic, even during periods where the narrative is slanted against him, more than a few readers raise their eyebrows during his argument with Delia. Ash is highly aggressive during this sequence, calling his mother 'petty' and comparing her to Parker at his worst. Chloe notably displays a similar attitude without being called out for it right away, and narrative beats that underscore how Delia's insistence that he's forgiving too easily make him come off as worse in the argument than he was meant to be.
  • Parker in his courtroom scene is supposed to be seen as a poor kid who's fallen off the deep end because of reasons beyond his control, but there are a lot of reasons why this is a herculean task: first of all, the ramifications of his actions are far too big to make him seem sympathetic, a sentiment not helped by him showing the same condescending, "I'm better than you" attitude of snapping at people that he had before, making it look like he learned nothing from it. And finally, he just can't help putting his foot in his mouth, going on a massive Motive Rant against everybody in the courtroom that, given everything else that's been shown of him, seems more like a spoiled rotten kid whining at the world how everything is their fault while ignoring how he's done much more, potentially irreparable damage compared to them.
  • Mallow's supposed to be a sympathetic character whose snapping at her friends for not taking Gladion's disappearance seriously is meant to be cathartic. Problem is, she kept the existence of the Train a secret for what turned out to be a complete misunderstanding on her part, making her plight come off more as something she brought upon herself.
• Wangst: It can be really hard to side with Chloe due to her acting like a bitch to everyone, holding petty grudges against them, and essentially throwing a colossal temper tantrum just because she wasn't given what she wanted on her terms.

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