What do you think about the capitalizing Pokemon names debate in relation to fanfiction or writing in general? Some people say names such as Ponyta would be considered common nouns, like the word horse, to inhabitants of the Pokemon world and thus should not be capitalized. Others say Ponyta would be a species name and therefore it is correct to leave it capital. I noticed you usually capitalize the names in your BW Playthrough journal; is there any particular reason, or is it just habit?

There’s a debate on that?

…huh.

To be honest, I never knew it was in question.  All the big fansites that I know of always capitalise them, as do the games themselves, the official website, and promotional materials.  Frankly, I’m not sure I can think of any actual evidence that, in-universe, the names of Pokémon species are not capitalised.  I suppose the easiest way to account for this is by saying that it’s simply a point of convention specific to the cultures of the Pokémon universe.  They capitalise Pokémon names because they do.  Rules of capitalisation are not universal by any stretch of the imagination – German, for instance, capitalises all nouns, while French doesn’t capitalise days of the week, months of the year, or nationalities (however, it does – I have just checked pokemon.com/fr – capitalise the names of Pokémon), and Japanese (like most languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet) has no equivalent to capitalisation at all, as far as I know.

(Also, purely as a point of incidental interest, by convention species names should not be capitalised; genus names should be – so humans, for instance, are Homo sapiens, capital H, minuscule s, chimpanzees are Pan troglodytes, capital P, minuscule t, and so on.  Attempting to apply this distinction to Pokémon is probably a waste of time, though, since according to strict biological definitions most Pokémon are actually subspecies or breeds of only thirteen species)