Right.
What am I doing?
Oh, yeah. That thing that I do with the Pokémon and the stuff that I say and the other thing. Gotcha.
Why am I doing that again?
Well, mostly it’s because I’m supposed to, right? I reviewed all the Unova Pokémon in 2011, a little while after Black and White came out; I was on Blogspot at that time, of course, but the entries are all archived on here now. I wanted to give a critical appraisal of all the new Pokémon, to stake for myself a middle ground between “ALL TEH NEW POKEMAN SUXX0RZ” (where “new” can mean anything from the second generation onward, really) on the one hand, and “all Pokémon are perfect just the way they are and we should love them all equally,” on the other. Frightfully silly of me, in retrospect, because no one actually thinks like this (do they? I hope not), but then I was writing mainly for my ex-trainer friends in the beginning, not for the Pokémon Master zeitgeist, as it were. I always finished those with either “I hereby affirm this Pokémon’s right to exist,” or “I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist” followed by some amusing hyperbole about what I thought should be done to punish it for existing. That was supposed to be over the top, of course – all those entries were; I was just having fun – but it was also frightfully silly in retrospect because it wasn’t what I meant at all, really (well… at least, not most of the time). What I meant was that those Pokémon needed work, and if time or money were a concern in doing that work, well, maybe it would have made more sense to cut some and lavish more attention on the rest, make a smaller generation of cleverer, better thought-out designs rather than a bigger one that ended up half filler. If that meant having pre-fifth generation Pokémon in Unova, well, would it really have been so bad to give old favourites some time in the sun? I’m a great fan of doing more with less, you see. That hasn’t changed. I’m not really in a critical mood anymore, though. Maybe that’s because I’ve just gotten soft in the intervening three years, or maybe it’s because I feel the sixth generation designs are legitimately better, on the whole (and here I have to point out, smugly, that while the fifth generation was the largest yet, the sixth has been the smallest). I’m happier now just to take it as read that Pokémon has some remarkably stupid things in it, and focus on the good bits, but more importantly on why they’re good. I mean… it’s not that I’m going to stop bitching about things I don’t like, because where would be the fun in that? But this idea that I’m setting myself up as judge, jury and executioner? I feel like the tone of this blog has gotten more serious than that since I started, and I feel like my readers, for the most part, seem to appreciate it. There’s barely shy of four hundred of you now, do you know that? So Tumblr says, at any rate. I was quite happily announcing three hundred as a milestone only in December. I must be onto something here, though I confess I’m not quite sure what that is, and it would be a dreadful shame if I quit now.
So yeah. I think I’d better do it, don’t you?
Pokémaniacal 