Sometimes I'll see a PMD fic with tons and tons and tons of lore. From politics, countries, social structures, trading spiderwebs, on and on. In the comments, you'll sometimes see responses to lore like this along the lines of "My fic doesn't have nearly as detailed lore :("

But like...is that a bad thing?

SHOULD your fic have tons of lore?

While having a heap of worldbuilding can be fun it's also extremely time-consuming to build. Presumably you'd only want to do that much world building because you plan on actually...using it.

If your story is a simple love story or an unserious comedy fic or a tightly focused drama, then there's really no need to expend a bunch of energy writing lore and politics and etc. It'd just be a waste of time and energy and is more likely to burn you out and leave your story unfinished as opposed to making it any better.

This is especially if 90% of the lore doesn't end up being seen, rendering all that hard work completely pointless.

And there's nothing wrong with not having a bunch of lore anyway! The ONLY part that counts is the story and ESPECIALLY the characters. The rest is nice fluff, makes a world feel real and lived in, but the characters and plot must ALWAYS come first and foremost or else everything is for naught.

Here's food for thought: the technological progression of your fic. Previously, we asked about where tech is in your world, but now we want to think of the process of getting to that point.

Isekai is the heart of PMD. Of course, not every PMD is nor should be an isekai, but that *is* where PMD has its roots. It's all about you, regular Joe BagO'Donuts falling into an alien and fantasy world of Pokemon where you suddenly make new friends (and in the world of fanfiction, romance partners teehee~).

It's a fun and appealing concept. Isekais are not only fun escapism from the banality of the real world but also stories about the human ability to adapt to sudden new situations. You're a Pokemon! Now what?? The world is spread before you. Make a goal. Make a plan. And try to blend in, little fish out of water.

There's just one problem, and it's baked right into the very concept of isekai: Humans are EXTREMELY adaptable. In time, obviously, a human that once couldn't even walk in their new body will improve, be able to fight, learn the lingo and the culture, connect with the locals, and eventually...it'll seem like they were never a human to begin with.

But then you're left with a standard adventure fantasy story. The isekai concept is rendered null once your fish out of water grows legs.

Some stories try to counteract this with fun gimmicks - the human can't understand the pokemon language is a common one, leaving a language barrier persistently in place. But, once again, languages can be learned, and working around a constant language barrier can get tedious to write *and* read about. An easy solution is always found: draw instead. Or have someone able to half-understand the fish out of water, until again, the language barrier may as well not even matter.

It's a pretty weird conundrum, one that I'm not sure has an answer. Barriers to full integration are issues to overcome. Not overcoming them feels boring and unsatisfying. Overcoming them removes a fun part of isekai.

Man, Mystery Dungeons are WEIRD. Obviously in the games they're just a gameplay device. They're given a hand-waving explanation that they're these strange spacetime distortions and then after that they're practically treated like just traversing locations normally. Because obviously traversing a mountain should have roughly the same game mechanics as navigating the bottom of a lake...with 90% of the difference being the enemies found and a pallet swap.

But in stories...not a lot happens in Mystery Dungeons. Oh, sure, navigating a confusing maze of blocky hallways while slowly starving and facing an endless hoard of aggro'd Pokemon whilst trying to desperately claw your way to the end SOUNDS pretty appealing. I mean, hell, we've all had INTENSE fights in Monster Houses that feel like they'd be pure CINEMA when put to page.

But I think many of us writers have found that, in practice, Mystery Dungeons in fics can be kind of samey. Boring. Slow and uneventful. Thus, we've started to see many different implementations of the Mystery Dungeon Concept.

The way I've seen it done so far is in 3 ways:

Regular Places

Backrooms-Esque Madhouses

Skipped Over Almost Entirely

Going over each briefly, 'Regular Places' refers to stories that abandon the 'rooms + corridors + enemies' format of Mystery Dungeons and essentially just make them regular places, or even opt out of having Mystery Dungeons at all. This might make the 'Mystery Dungeon' part of 'Pokemon Mystery Dungeon' redundant, but it means also that each location can be hand-crafted and given some proper context in the world. The enemies fought are there for a reason, the 'dungeon' has a place in the grand scope of the world, and it goes to help each 'dungeon' feel wholly unique. (Examples include Story of Arceus / Fire & Stone).

Next is a more recent development, turning Mystery Dungeons into Backrooms-Esque Madhouses. Essentially, it leans even harder into Mystery Dungeons as squarish rooms and corridors and tries to present it in an uncanny or horrifying way, much like 'The Backrooms', with similarly horrifying monsters roaming the halls. This attempts to fix the issue of Mystery Dungeons being boring by instead making them incredibly imposing or genuinely mysterious and strange, sparking curiosity about their true nature. (Examples include Team Journal, Paradoxical Light, Noble Dungeoneers).

SO! We just had an epic battle or a huge reveal or some really fucked up shit just went down. Things might be feeling a bit breakneck, a bit mile-a-minute with no slowdown to process anything. Maybe you, the writer, are getting exhausted with how fast everything is going and you just want to take a break.

Easy way to do it?

Food.

Eating!!