Read at: AO3
The competitive world of Pokemon is multi-layered. There's the single-player experience, where you lead your team of six critters against eight Gym Leaders and then the Elite Four. Then there's multi-player, where you and your friends link up to pit your critters against each other. Finally, there's the competitive multi-player community on Smogon, which might as well be a different language. Stalling, mixed sweepers, revenge killing, wallbreakers. To every Pokemon its tier, whether that be Little Cup, Never Used, Borderline or the Ubers. To these folks, the game is a solved problem, even if every new generation shuffles the pieces.
"When I Win the World Ends" takes place in a version of the Pokemon world where Smogon's rules and strategies are law. Trainers win not by inspiring their Pokemon to be their very best, but by obsessively min-maxing them for the current meta. Battles are hilariously, transparently artificial, and by design.
Really though, "When I Win the World Ends" the story of two girls competing in the World Championship tournament. Toril is a Pokemon savant who lives in the mountains with her team because she hates people. Aracely is a fashionable, sociable girl who knows nothing about Pokemon at all. Even her team is chosen by her father.
But Cely has a knack for getting into people's heads. First she nearly beats Toril. Then she she smokes every trainer she encounters after that. Could she be the next champion? Is everything that Toril ever believed about Pokemon competitive battling wrong? Meanwhile, powerful actors work to achieve their goals from the shadows.
"When I Win the World Ends" was written by Bavitz, the author of the Madoka Magica fanfiction "Fargo" as well as the web serials "Modern Cannibals" and "Cockatiel x Chameleon." Bavitz's work is interesting in that it is ambitious but also sometimes blinkered. His stories engage with style and theme in ways that you don't always see from fanfiction. On the other hand, I didn't get the sense from this story (or from his "making of" piece discussing its creation) that he had any sense of the broader community while he was writing it.
That said, I think that "When I Win the World Ends" has a lot to offer even to folks who aren't Bavitz fans. The battles have an amazing sense of spectacle, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has read Fargo. His characters are also a lot of fun to follow; they are all terrible people but also surprise you at times. There's a warmth in "When I Win the World Ends" that feels new to me compared to his rather cruel early stories.
"When I Win the World Ends" isn't the first work of Pokemon fanfiction to examine its world through a critical lens. It is however very entertaining, which is what is most important anyway.