Thread: Magikarp the Mystical Nomad!

Pokemon to catch: Magikarp
Characters: 3291

"But Papa I wannit!" The shrill sound was like nails on a chalkboard, and it had worked before. He would not give in this time, he refused to buy his son the useless fish. Worse yet, he didn't want his son around the evolved form Gyarados if it ever managed to evolve. That would destroy their entire house! But his son would not listen. Persistent little brat! He had to draw the line somewhere, or else he'd just think he could get anything he wanted by yelling.

"Papa! Magikahp! Magikahp! I want da pwetty fish!"

He really shouldn't have took his son to market today, but his wife had other plans. No one was willing to watch the boy that day either, the usual babysitter was unwilling to watch him during the day because she had weekend college classes. Between that and a fulltime job during the week, she was booked most of the time. So he was stuck taking his son to market. Times like this really made him question his faith; had he not been catholic he could have used some sort of contraceptive. He loved the little brat though, most of the time. Never mind that he had made him give up his dreams of being a rock 'n roller, never mind that he'd had a record deal. But now the little ruffian wanted him to buy a Magikarp. A Magikarp! Their useless and iritating flopping, their tendency to evolve into pseudodragons of destruction, why would anyone want one? Not him, that was for sure. He walked away from the fish area of the market, having already purchased the fresh fish he'd needed for dinner that night. He only needed to pick up a few last things before finally heading home from that dreadful afternoon. The rest of it hadn't been much better, but the recent nagging for the Magikarp was by far the worst. Why did he want it so badly? It wasn't cute, nor cool. Was it the name? He'd assured his son that it was merely what it was called, the creature wasn't magical in the least. He had broken into a chant now... where was a gag when you needed one!

"Magi, magi, magikahp! Magi, magi, magikahp!"

It went on and on. He felt like all of the other patrons in the market were looking at him and his son, and many of them were.

"I-I'm sorry, he just gets so stubborn sometimes... I'll try to calm him down."

This was merely a bluff, and he knew very well when his son got like this nothing would settle him. He remembered one time when he was at a restaurant, his son refused to take anything less than the most expensive steak in the place, knowing quite well he had no hope of eating more than a small amount of it. But it had gotten the boy to shut up at least, and he'd learned that most of the time caving was worth the peace and quiet. Unfortunately the boy had also learned this, and he solemnly regretted not putting his foot down initially.

"Magi, magi, magikahp! Magi, magi, magikahp!"

"Alright!" The man said.

"I'll tell you what. We'll go back to see the fish, and I'll get you something. But NOT a Magikarp."

"Magi, magi, magikahp!"

He grabbed his sons hand and pulled him back towards the fish area. He didn't resist, as hope remained in him that he could convince his father to get him the Pokémon he wanted.

"Lets see what they have... all right, they have Goldeen. Do you want a Goldeen instead?"

"FUCK YEAH!"

Heh, why not... we'll just pretend that this is my first grade and the other one never happened, m'kay?

I'll try to get this up by tomorrow at the latest. LOOK AT ME, CLAIMING BEFORE STUFF EVEN HITS THE LIST... BAHA. DAMMIT, ALASKA... WHY U SO FAST...

LOOK AT ME. THIS GRADE SHALL BE SHORTER THAN THIS STORY. I PROMISE.
…okay, I definitely lied. Whatever. This is, like, your third story and my first second… grade. THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY THAT I CAN SCREW THIS UP. Let’s rock.

Introduction: So, the introduction of a story is pretty important. You can tell that the all caps introduction I did for this grade did absolutely nothing to help my cause and probably did nothing but annoy you. A good introduction has to be riveting and entertaining, and it has to grab the reader’s attention. At later levels, it should also, ya know, introduce people and settings into the story. Let’s take a look at the first part of your introduction, namely the first sentence because this story is pretty short anyways:

"But Papa I wannit!" The shrill sound was like nails on a chalkboard, and it had worked before.

That’s technically two sentences, but I digress. Starting off with dialogue and action is a refreshing twist from monologues and philosophical quotes, and it does practically all of the jobs of an introduction. With what you have, you leave us wondering who the speaker is and why they’re saying what they’re saying – essentially, the basis of a good hook. The added detail with the nails on a chalkboard also adds a bit of an ominous feel, while the strange form of dialogue (wannit!) tells us that the character is going to be different, in the least… basically, a combination of both of those aspects is pretty intriguing: I wanted to see where you’d go with this premise.

Overall, nice job. ^.^

Plot: It wasn’t “boy walks into a forest, finds Pokémon, catches Pokémon, etc”… it also wasn’t even “boy goes fishing for a Pokéon, finds Pokémon, catches Pokémon”. You have “father goes into market, finds Pokémon… doesn’t catch Pokémon”? Eh, the concept of purchasing a Magikarp from somewhere for cheap is as old as Pokémon Red, but you have little things in it such as the annoying kid and the agitated father that made things a lot more interesting. When you add all of the characters in, I don’t think I’ve seen a plot like this before for a Magikarp, or really at all. That’s pretty unique in itself, and you definitely have the plot requirements for an Easiest level Pokémon.

There were, however, a few things that I wanted to bring up. Sure, the dad's agitated with his son for embarrassing him in a store/market/thingy, and you’ve shown that said son can really be a spoiled kid, but the father is still a father. You have this guy calling his kid a brat, hating the kid, hating the Magikarp, hating his lack of contraceptives… he just seems to have a lot of animosity for the boy and life in general. I mean, for crying out loud, he wants to gag the poor kid… it looks like comic relief at first, but that’s borderline cruel… Maybe the boy is a lot worse than you say he is (he just sounds like a spoiled kid, but hey… at least he’s not violent XD), or the father has had a lot worse of a time with his son than he feels like talking about. Or the kid’s father isn’t actually who you say he is, and the “father” here is actually just his uncle, and the kid’s father is Darth Vader… eh, screw the last one. Point being, he seems pretty mean. You might want to explain why, or fix some of his thoughts a bit.

Overall, you’ve got a good plot here. It’s simple, but then you have a strange father-son relationship that could use some delving in to that makes the dynamic of the story a lot different. Eh, perhaps that’s just me and modern kids are just jerks, but I dunno. Be sure to expand upon all of your characters when you write them in, though, as it’ll help you wrap up all of those plot holes. Besides this, though, your plot is definitely complex enough for a Magikarp capture. Again, nice work. ^.^

Description/Detail: One thing that I noticed in your description was that you did a pretty good job at describing the father. You helped us get inside of his head, understand his frustration (although it still confused me, lol), and walked us through his thought process. Interestingly enough, though, you didn’t give us much to work with. If I didn’t know what a Magikarp is, your story would have told me that it’s useless, irritating, and flops around like that. There are a lot of things in the world that do that, and I can’t say half of them on a children’s forum, and that was a joke of horrible taste… but point being, if you edited out the word “Magikarp” from the story, I’d have a hard time guessing what you were going for.

This difference in description, however, isn’t altogether too bad. Unlike most Magikarp stories, this one seems to be focused more on the characters themselves rather than the Pokémon, and you did a good job of describing how the main character felt and whatnot throughout the course of your story. It wouldn’t hurt to spend a bit of time describing what Magikarp looks like, but it wasn’t completely awful, in this case, that the Magikarp got less focus than the people themselves: this seemed more like a character based story than a plot based one, if such a distinction can be made with such a short story. We could use some more description, though, such as the father/son's appearance, and the Magikarp's, and you'll definitely want that at some higher levels. Here, though, what you have is fine.

Grammar: Bahaha, since this is a really short story, I should probably point out the grammatical mistakes that I see because every misspelled word is 1/605… XD But I won't. These are a few general rules that spell check might not pick up.
*

He would not give in this time, he refused to buy his son the useless fish.

I GET TO LECTURE YOU ABOUT CLAUSES. BAHAAHAHAHA. (also, there were two more sentences like this, but I'm just here to teach you the concept)
Uh, so basically, you’ll have to clauses: independent (it can stand on its own: “Fred went to the store”) and dependent (cannot stand on its own as a sentence: “Although Fred went to the store…”). Both clauses have a set of rules that you need to follow when connecting them together: both halves of the sentence(s) above, “He would not give in this time” and “he refused to buy his son the useless fish” can stand on their own, making them independent clauses. To connect two independent clauses, you’ll have to use either a coordinating conjunction (things like and/but/so/for, etc) or a semicolon with no conjunction. So, you’d either have:
He would not give in this time; he refused to buy his son the useless fish (or) He would not give in this time, and he refused to blah blah blee…
*

Their useless and iritating flopping, their tendency to evolve into pseudodragons of destruction, why would anyone want one?

It’s not really grammatical, but this sentence just feels… really weird. I dunno. Read it over again and take a look. I think the main problem lies in your non-parallelism: you’ve got a participle, an infinitive, and a question all linked together in the same sentence, and it just reads awkwardly. Also, it kinda reads like a fragment, although it technically isn’t… tl;dr: read sentences like this over again and fix the wording, m’kay? Oh, and irritating has two r's. XD
*

It wasn't cute, nor cool.

Ooh, this one was tricky because you used a contraction, but there’s some stipulations when using nor: namely, it should be preceded by “neither” in the same sentence, not “not”. Also, kill the comma. So it’d actually look more like:
It was neither cute nor cool.
*
There were, like, two typos in this story. I'm not going to bother pointing them out because it feels redundant, but you can just run a quick spell check through them and you'll be golden. Anywho, your story was pretty good grammatically. There’s always room for improvement, as there is with everyone, but your grammar is good enough for a Magikarp and then some.

Dialogue: Time for a quick lecture on dialogue tags. I wasn’t sure if it was a simple typo or if you just had the capitalization wrong, but I decided to play it safe. RAMBLE TIME.

"Alright!" The man said.

Just remember that if a piece of dialogue ends with an exclamation point or a question mark, the starting letter of the sentence following, if it has a dialogue tag (basically, anything meaning said/asked/etc) relating to the piece of dialogue in question, should not be capitalized. Think of the new sentence as a continuation of the dialogue said, in which case it wouldn’t be capitalized. With that in mind, you’d get something more like:
“Alright!” the man said.
However, if the bit of sentence that follows the sentence is not a dialogue tag but a normal verb, you’d capitalize that letter there. You didn’t have any examples in a story of this length, but I’ll just throw one in real quick to clear things up.
[i]“Alright!” The man smiled.[/b]
Only one word changed, but notice how “smiled” isn’t really linked to the dialogue, whereas said is. Keep little things like that in mind, m’kay?

The funny thing is, that above sentence is the only piece of dialogue in your entire story that is accompanied by any form of a different sentence, be it speech tag or otherwise. Basically, it was hard to tell who was saying what. It’s not the worst thing you could do, but there’s very little description involved. How do people feel when they’re saying things? When the man is apologizing for his son’s antics, is he angry or is he just embarrassed? The stuttering implies the latter, but you should definitely expand upon that. In addition to lacking detail, dialogue like this also gets confusing. For example, in exchanges such as the following:

"Lets see what they have... all right, they have Goldeen. Do you want a Goldeen instead?"

"FUCK YEAH!"

…we don’t really know who’s saying what. I’d assume that the father is the one speaking first and the son is second, but the kid sounds pretty young… if he can’t pronounce Magikarp, I don’t think he’d be running around dropping the f-bomb right and left just for shiggles… but if the order is inverted, the father is shouting out profanity in a public marketplace in front of his son… because he’s so happy… that his kid wants him to buy a fish…? THIS DUNNUT MAKE SENSE.
Oh. And if you’re gonna go around having with exchanges like this in your story, you should prolly post a warning for profanity. I don’t really mind anymore, but it is a children’s forum and half of the visitors here probably don’t even know what that means… ._.
Off of that tangent, you really should get into the practice of specifying who is speaking to whom. At higher stories, you’d probably want to focus on specifying the speaker in addition to some emotions and description about how the speaker feels and the manner in which stuff like that is being said. That’ll both add to the mood of your piece, expand upon your characters, and help out with some detail.

As it is, though, you’ve got a decent enough mastery of dialogue that I can let you go here, too. It’s not as good as some of your other aspects, but it’s certainly enough for a Magikarp capture.

Length: You said 3291; I’m an untrusting jerk with a bad character counter that puts you at 3256. Magikarp is an Easiest rank, with a suggested count of 3-5K. You’re in the clear, but barely: remember, it’s always nice to have a bit of cushion in case your counter is off or something else is off, and because it never hurts to aim for the upper ranks. You had some room for a bit of description, but besides that, I don’t have any issues with your story’s pacing. (Although, I think that if you added some description, you could easily pass four or even five K. AWESOME, RIGHT?)

Gah, before I go overboard. Length is fine for a Magikarp. Huzzah.


Personal Feelings/Outcome:

Okay, I admit, I might have gotten a bit overexcited about the relationship between the boy and his father. I was honestly intrigued as to why the father seemed to hate the boy so much or was at least unnaturally vicious towards his own son, but that’s probably just my reading too far in to things. Just keep in mind that once you get to more advanced levels, you’ll have to keep more complex things such as relationships between your characters in mind. As it is, though, you’re perfectly fine when you’re aiming for small things like Magikarp.

Your story was entertaining and cute, and the end bit made me rofl inside. Somehow. Point being, you definitely had enough to capture Easiest Pokémon like Magikarp, and maybe a bit higher. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll also have to step it up a bit on your description, grammar (well, just kinda; you can easily fix that with spell check), and a your dialogue, as well as things like character development once you get to higher levels. Don’t get me wrong; you’ve got a great start already, even for some higher level captures. A lot of stuff that I pointed out here is “ON YOUR NEXT STORY, YOU SHOULD…” kind of thing, and most of it is there just so that this entire grade isn’t full of “YOUR _____ IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR A MAGIKARP” kind of things.

Oh, yeah.

Magikarp: captured

Eh. It looks like YOUR STORY IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR A MAGIKARP (Cwutididthar?)

You definitely had the basics down for an Easiest ‘mon, so I have no qualms in giving this fish to you. It’s not a Goldeen, and it won’t evolve into a Seaking, but that’s your problem. As it is, this story is perfectly fine for a Magikarp. Nice job. ^.^