A quick essay review of 'Our Alternate Ending' by iAmourship. Keep in mind that due to the length of the story, I will be doing this piece by piece, as I read it, so I may make some points that are contradicted by later parts of the book.

The story starts out with our characters getting ready to depart from their long time together. The thing is, no one really wants to leave. Whenever you start an amourshipping story, you want to set up everything that you want to change from the original. The change, it seems, is to make each of the characters more mature. As a story on its own, this small change means nothing, but when you aim to create an 'alternative ending' to an original source, you shouldn't change it up, but yet this story does. It takes away from my own immersion into the story, as I need to rethink who the characters actually are.

Ash and Serena soon agree that they should stay in kalos for longer, because of a 'feeling' ash has. This feeling would soon develop into what we in the shipping community like to call, a crush. This is actually a good way to develop ash, making it seem more like that alternate ending the author was going for.

Another problem that I have with this book is that Serena seems to have been reset. She acts like when she was first introduced into the story, extremely shy around ash. I really feel that the anime series built up Serena, but all of that is just ignored. Sure, there are some benefits to having a character not already half built, but I still wanted this to be a definitive alt ending. Instead it's just a normal story.

This problem of Serena's maturity being reset from the end of the series is a claim that I don't only want to make, but instead I want to actually add context to these claims. Call to attention, chapter 14, the elevator chapter. In this chapter ash and Serena are stuck in an elevator, and Serena gets on ash's shoulders to try and escape. Of course, she completely freaks out over this one small detail. This would have made sense for early show Serena. She is alone with ash, and freaks out about a date, and is generally nervous around him. The only problem, is that as the show progresses, she gets more comfortable around him. The problem is that if this story happens after the show, then those details in that chapter shouldn't have been included.

Another problem I have is with the fact that due to the peaceful setting, conflict is created out of nothing. Ash and Serena get stuck in that same elevator chapter I talked about before, and it gets pretty 'intense' for an elevator. As well as that, the character Elaina really just annoys me. She gets picked on, freaks out, is locked in her room, meets her friends, is completely fine, then everyone worries about her hurting herself. The fact that all of this happens, and her character doesn't even change (at least from where I have read to) is just insane. Another thing, is that with Elaina having the type of backstory she did, it made no sense for her to ever be the one pushing the relationship of amour. Her background just doesn't match up with her character.

One interesting theory I have is that Elaina is a way For the author to voice their own opinions as if they were right there. I say this because of passages like this:

It just makes me feel as if she herself doesn't have very many motives of her own, instead just forwarding the plot by helping amour shipping.

Okay, so I know I'm not that far in the book, but I felt like I needed to get something out, so more to come in the future.