I think this set of Battles is where Classic Sandy goes from being slightly wince-inducing (not all the time, but now and again) to fairly easy for me to reread. I'm not sure what it is about them, but for me at least they flow well leading to me needing to reread some of them twice because I just read the entire batch rather than remembering to comment on them the first time around.
Battle 21
...I'd forgotten I used a VR.5 reference for Narratra's first appearance. Interesting little show, with a 13 episode total run, not all of those episodes were transmitted in the US where the show originates in the initial run (this was intentional, IIRC it had an 11 episode commission so a couple of extra episodes were made to make it an easier sell to foreign markets). Also, this battle contains the most important typo in Sandy Version - I misspelt coma consistently throughout the battle, and the Narrator got trapped inside a comma as a result of it, not just influencing the plotline of this version of Sandy from my "Nah, I'll run with it" rather than correcting the error when it was pointed out to me, but impacting several aspects about modern Sandy - SVWebmaster trapping SVWebmaster inside a Tilde wouldn't have been the basis of the second arc, Ben wouldn't have caught the narrator inside a comma leading into Narrator is Missing, and so forth if it weren't for this battle.
While I make jokes about Narratra having a 'bad font colour' in this battle, I actually prefer Narratra's font colour to the Narrator's these days, just because it's better contrast on a black background (This is why modern Sandy uses #ff5e5e for the Narrator text rather than red). Also, I'm more up on pink these days than I used to be.
Three Battles in a row with a reference to the PB IRC community at the time. Sure, why not.
I like the idea that Narratra wasn't Narrated due to being behind the Narrator - That's actually doing something with the idea that this Narrator isn't a disembodied voice but has a body, and is pretty funny.
Font sizes were something I used to play with a lot, compared to 'not at all' in modern Sandy. Not sure why I haven't been doing that, while it's a bit... Obnoxious... with how I did it here, the way Hiber does it in Foxfire shows it can be done more subtly in ways that aren't annoying to read.
NARRATOR is out of USEABLE puns!
NARRATOR went COMATOSE!
This is a cute play on the "
Battle 22
An example of the 'AOL is evil' trope of classic PokéBattles, and an exploration of a more chatty, less capslock using, Narrational Entity.
Narratra's early reference to the battle name is cute and not something I'm likely to replicate in Modern Sandy since the battle name is often the last thing I come up with.
AOLRep probably shouldn't have been using punctuation. Or at least full stops.
Another reference to the IRC community of the time in this one.
Narratra not taking "i don't want 2" as wanting to Battle is a fun joke and likely an early reflection of my current insistence of pronouncing numbers replacing letters as the number (For example I often pronounce the British reality television show Unan1mous as Unanonemous in the rare cases that thing comes up)
IRC format jokes in PokeBattles is a style of gag that, while not having aged particularly well on account of, well, IRC no longer really being a thing, and none of the modern platforms that have basically replaced it really having an equivalent, is one that I appreciate.
The battle missing the cue for ending is a cute gag.
Battle 23
The Narrator having an Inner Narrator is amusing, and its distinguishing factor from an Ego being a 'desire to talk in all caps' equally so.
I forgot that the Narrator realized, allowing it to escape its coma (but not its comma) this soon after becoming trapped inside it. The Twilight Zone reference is also cute.
...Ordinal fertility points? Degree fertility points? I was probably going for the infinity symbol there and... Did something else instead?
Not much to say about this one, really, it's just a cute little concept and resolves half of the barriers for the Narrator without really changing the status quo.
Battle 24
Narratra describing the Narrator as "having some punctuating problems" is... Cute, as is the idea of Davis calling a spaceship SVP Digivolve. There are a lot of cute jokes here, come to think of it, the shockwave that installs Windows on the SVP Digivolve rendering everything in English, Narratra punishing Davis for bad puns...
The opening premise for the Battle - That no-one on this ship has any idea what they're doing because it's a Klingon bird of prey so all of the writing is Klingon is amusing, and it's kind of a shame the Battle abandons that as quickly as it does.
This would happen the day it's my turn to be in charge ><
What's this Emergency Escape Po... button?
Dave: There mustn't have been enough room to write Emergency Escape Pod on, press it!
Hey! I'm in charge here! Press it!
Is a weirdly effective gag, and that Emergency Escape Po... being a Portal not a Pod is a bit of writing that I hugely enjoy reading back, as is Narratra tricking SVWebmaster into going through the portal via Narrating 'fentering' the portal rather than entering it.
Not sure the Battle needed the Inside the Comma sequence at the end, but it doesn't hurt it either.
Battle 25
When I do this sort of thing, splitting to a completely separate concept, as a single battle and when I do it as two Battles is something that I do by feel. The first half has a few light gags in it but doesn't do anything particularly novel. The second half, meanwhile, has a couple of cute gags in it but feels like it's mainly here to make sure an actual battle happened. The Battle's mostly there, advancing the Narrator's side of the plot, but... It doesn't really do anything.
BUGS, by the by, was a modern-day set sci-fi/technological espionage show from the mid 90s with an excellent first two seasons and an absolutely fine final two seasons (although recasting Ed for the final season is frustrating). And which infuriatingly ends on a cliffhanger.