What’s your view on human-shape pokemon? I’ve always found the Mr. Mimes and Sawks of this world kind of odd, because they awkwardly are made to look human-but-not-quite. There’s always been a lot of lambasting of Jynx and Mime from the beginning, but Gamefreak seem happy to churn out a new human every generation (see Hitmons, Ralts line and Gothitelle). Why would it be beneficial for a pokemon to look like a person? And if they’re psychically/mentally superior why haven’t they taken over?

Well, Jynx gets flak because someone pointed out that she resembles an actor in blackface, and could therefore be interpreted as a racist caricature (personally I don’t think this is what they intended at all, but they could have been a little more careful with what they were doing), not necessarily because of the humanoid thing.  I think there is a degree of ‘uncanny valley’ in it, but then, people love Gardevoir (personally I think Gardevoir looks markedly less human than Jynx or Gothitelle, but whatever).  Personally, I get annoyed when they build Pokémon around elements of contemporary culture, like Gothitelle and Scrafty, because I think the ones that work with traditional culture and mythology are just more interesting and can also work more effectively with the idea of the massive cultural debt humans have to Pokémon in this universe, but I suppose maybe that’s just my personal taste.

I actually think “why would it be beneficial for a Pokemon to look like a person?” is a backwards way of looking at it, because the Pokémon may well have come first.  And we have that in the real world, actually; humans are just one of four surviving genera of great ape (the others being chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans), all of which bear marked physical similarities to us.  In this case, it’s because we share a common ancestor with them – is this true in the Pokémon world too?  Are humans related to Pokémon of the humanshape group?  Possibly; who knows?  And as for why they haven’t taken over – well, this applies equally to all Pokémon, and it links in with one of the most important questions of the setting: there are clearly a lot of things Pokémon do better than humans, so what is there that humans do better than Pokémon?  Personally I think the answer is related to creativity and leadership, but that’s a tricky one indeed.  You also have to question what is meant by “taking over” in this context – humans have a civilisation characterised by agriculture, industrialisation, art, education, and so on… but I have to wonder whether Pokémon would necessarily view any of these things as benchmarks of success.  If they simply didn’t want any of that, would that be enough to ‘prevent’ them from ‘taking over’?