Yeah, it… sometimes takes me a while to get around to answering these, especially if I’m not sure what to say immediately… eheh…
Okay, so, what you’re actually saying is that you think ‘consent’ should not automatically prevent us from labelling Pokémon training as slavery? That is an interesting point. As I said, I don’t think slavery actually precludes consent if you go by a dictionary definition; I just can’t think of any real-world examples of consensual slavery (well, except for people who are born into slavery and simply never think to challenge it, but that’s sort of a different issue – that happens in Pokémon training too, when trainers hatch eggs, but I think here we’re mainly considering cases where there is an actual moment of capture). If you look at it from a strictly definitional or legal perspective, then it depends on whether you consider a Pokémon a person (I suspect the laws and governments of the Pokémon world do not) and on whether trainers actually own their Pokémon in a legally binding sense (and I suspect that they do, although unsurprisingly I don’t think the question has ever come up). If we say “yes, Pokémon are people too” (which is something I’m reasonably comfortable doing, for the sake of argument) and assume that there is legal ownership involved, then that would mean that Pokémon training is, in fact, slavery – the difficulty is that it would be slavery of a kind that has never actually existed in the real world (as far as I know – if anyone knows of a real culture that practised consensual slavery, please do speak up!), which gives the word an extremely limited heuristic value. Would we actually consider slavery a bad thing if it were almost always consensual and strictly regulated to ensure slaves’ wellbeing? I don’t think you can easily answer that question, since (again, as far as I know) it’s never happened. We’re kind of going off the deep end of cultural relativism there.
What I said about Stockholm syndrome the first time stands, I think. I mean, I’m not a psychologist, so perhaps I don’t understand the phenomenon as well as I should, but I’m pretty sure that Stockholm syndrome is, by definition, something experienced by prisoners, and is normally used to describe victims in a hostage situation. I would say that, if there is consent involved from the beginning, especially if the subordinate party is free to leave (as I do believe Pokémon are), it’s not Stockholm – just plain old friendship.
P.S. You really don’t need to call me ‘sir’. I’m not exactly an authority figure here. 🙂
EDIT: Actually, there’s another point I hadn’t thought of – slaves are commodities. There is a market (in the abstract, economic sense) for slaves in societies that have them; slaves are bought and sold regularly for prices dictated by market forces. Do people buy and sell Pokémon? The only example I can think of is the game corner, which is problematic, firstly because the original game corner in Red and Blue was a Team Rocket operation, so using it as our standard for legitimacy is clearly suspect, and secondly because later iterations of the game corner stopped offering Pokémon and started dealing only in rare items (which suggests to me that the designers may have been aware of the incongruity and deliberately chosen to remove it). Pokémon can be traded; they can be exchanged for other Pokémon, but not for money, or indeed anything else, as far as I know. Can anyone else think of any other situation in which Pokémon are bought and sold legitimately? If not, then that would suggest that Pokémon trainers do not have total freedom to do as they wish with their Pokémon (or, at the very least, that Pokémon are considered uniquely valuable in a way which would make traditional chattel slavery difficult to accommodate).
Pokémaniacal 