Month: Nov 2014

What do you think makes Pokémon separate from other classes of animals? Like, what certain traits does an animal have to have to be classified as one? It seems like “able to use certain fighting techniques and can be stored in a Poké ball” are the only ones, but a class should have more specific traits than that…

Eh.  How you think about this kinda depends on how widespread and diverse you believe non-Pokémon animals are in the Pokémon world, which is awkward because early generations and anime episodes often implied that there were quite a lot of them and then later on they were sort of quietly swept under the carpet and it’s hard to tell whether they were retconned out of existence or we just don’t care about them, and personally I kinda tend to lean towards the former, but… meh?

In any case, I don’t think the groups in which Pokémon are defined are terribly scientific – like, I actually think “able to use certain fighting techniques” is probably pretty damn close to how they actually think about it in-universe.  Type, I’ve pretty well convinced myself now, has absolutely nothing to do with shared ancestry and in many cases (Flying, Ground, Normal, some others) not a whole lot to do with biology either, but is more of a descriptive framework for how a Pokémon functions in battle.  Bear in mind that people have supposedly been training Pokémon for hundreds if not thousands of years.  Pokémon training probably far predates any sort of scientifically rigorous approach to evolutionary biology, so the relevant terms and classifications are most likely to have utilitarian rather than analytical relevance – i.e., when you ask “is it a Pokémon?” early trainers would understand you to mean “can you battle with it?”

You have answered in the past what your favorite Pokémon of each generation and type is, as well as your least favorites of the same. You now have a new generation and type. Please finish these lists.

Hang on, let me find the old ones; I just want to stick in some links for reference… and also remember what the hell I said the first time…

Least favourite of each generation, favourite of each generation, least favourite of each type, favourite of each type.

All right, let’s see… 

Least favourite of this generation is Dedenne, hands down.  I generally felt that X and Y had better designs than Black and White did, overall; they had fewer that seemed derivative of earlier ones, and some really cool and weird stuff.  Even the ones that I don’t like are generally pretty interesting.  Except Dedenne, who is dumb.

Favourite of this generation is much harder, but Trevenant is definitely up there, and so is Malamar.  One of those two, probably.

Now, do any of the 6th-generation Pokémon manage to usurp spots on the two type lists?

Amaura and Aurorus, from an analytical perspective, are not terribly clever or interesting designs, I think, but I love them anyway for reasons of dinosaurs, and I think I can give them Rampardos’ old spot as my favourite Rock-types.

As I said in the original list, I’m not a huge fan of most Flying-types, but I am really fond of both Hawlucha and Noivern.  Either of them could claim that spot.  Hawlucha might also beat out Mienshao as my favourite Fighting-type.

That’s about it, I think.

And, finally, I guess I need to pick Fairy-types.  Hmm.  Least favourite is probably Dedenne again, followed by Snubbull and Granbull, whom you may recall popping up as my least favourite second-generation Pokémon.  Favourite Fairy Pokémon… mmm… might be Clefable, because I’m fond of the weird moon-worship thing they have going on, and the question of whether they’re aliens or not is kind of interesting.

Something came to mind: Back in Gen I, Mew was the first Mythical only attainable via a limited time real life event because it was literally thrown in at the last minute and was never meant to be obtainable, right? So why exactly do Game Freak keep making these kinds of Pokémon when they’ve clearly got no reason to be so? You don’t expect me to believe Diancie, Hoopa and Volcanion were all last minute too, do you? Aren’t they inherently against the series slogan, “gotta catch ’em all”?

You know, I never thought about it that way, but that’s a good point.  The whole idea of Pokémon that are unobtainable in the game started as an accident.  I can only suppose that they kept it up because Mew worked so well.  Remember the mystique Mew had in the first-generation era?

Or, uh… I don’t know; maybe you don’t… damn, I’m old…

But basically the fact that there was this ‘secret Pokémon’ that existed but couldn’t be found or captured normally was the source of more rumours and speculation than just about any other aspect of the game.  It helped that the internet was still young then, and reliable information was hard to come by (I didn’t have an internet-capable device of my own, and even if I had I wouldn’t have known where to begin looking).  There is in fact at least one glitch that you can manipulate to obtain Mew in Red and Blue (I’ve done it), but to my knowledge it didn’t become widely known until well after the end of those games’ time.  I think the continued introduction of ‘secret’ Pokémon – first Celebi, then Jirachi and Deoxys, and so on – was designed to capitalise on the same sense of mystery and excitement that surrounded Mew.

Now, of course, the idea that these Pokémon exist and will inevitably be revealed by Nintendo in due course has become totally routine – as has the fact that the Pokémon fan community will find any information about them that exists in the games, long before we’re actually ‘supposed to.’  But maybe getting us to run around and trade scraps of information and speculation like that is all part of the fun?  They must know, after all, that this is not the 1990s anymore and our capacity to extract, verify and share this information is orders of magnitude above what it was in Mew’s time.  They’re not stupid.  I think they do it specifically to make us talk about it.

A woman goes to her mother’s funeral. There, she meets what she believes is her soul mate. However, after the funeral, she has no way of contacting/finding him ever again. Three days later, she kills her sister. Why did she kill her?

Three possibilities.

a) Her sister was a right bitch.

b) She hopes that the man she believes to be her soulmate will attend her sister’s funeral, giving her another shot.

c) Her sister was a fetus in fetu which, entirely by coincidence, she was getting removed that week anyway.

Behold: the Snateor!

So a classics teacher friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that a student had made an amusing misspelling on an exam, saying that Julius Caesar was murdered by a group of ‘Snateors,’ and asked me to draw one because ‘Snateor’ sounded like a Pokémon and one of her other friends thought it should be a Fire/Rock-type combination of a snake and a meteor and I AM SO SORRY

Now, humans and Pokémon clearly have different traits which mark them as separate classes of life (eggs, the ability to be stored in a Poké Ball, etc.). We also know in the Pokémon world that there are multiple real-world plants and animals such as worms, your occasional fish, and all the animals they compare Pokémon to, and Raichu’s Asian elephants. My question is, how did humans manage to survive and evolve? Almost all of their traits are easily surpassed by Pokémon–even the lowly Magikarp

This question continues: “…*cont* leap over a mountain. Why didn’t natural selection kick humanity’s ass during their development, leaving only Pokémon? What circumstances would lead to humans surviving alongside Pokémon?”

Well, now, that is a difficult one, isn’t it?  I’m inclined to suggest that the way to get the answer is to go back to how natural selection and Darwinian evolution actually work.  ”Survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean that the biggest, fastest, strongest, or even smartest species survives.  It means that the species (or individual) survives whose traits are best suited to make efficient use of the available resources and reproduce.  My own country, New Zealand, provides some illustrative examples here.  Before its colonisation by the Maori people in about the 12th century AD or so, there were no land mammals in New Zealand – no dogs, no cats, no mustelids, none of that; in short, there were no land-based predators (although there were once giant eagles – some of the stuff in the Lord of the Rings is actually true).  What do you think happened to the birds?  Well, a great many of them, over the course of millions of years, lost the ability to fly.  Flight is expensive in terms of energy consumption, hugely so.  If you don’t need to fly, then that energy is better put to use having more babies.  Evolution dislikes waste intensely, and this can cause it to do things that often seem counterintuitive to us.  Primates, including humans, are among the most intelligent animals in the world, have excellent colour vision, and like all mammals can maintain a constant body temperature in the face of fairly significant environmental change – and we pay for those things dearly; we’re forced to rely on relatively large amounts of high-energy foods like meat and fruits while slower, stupider animals can just sit and munch on leaves all day.  Consider Pokémon, then, who have a myriad of abilities that must be every bit as costly as flight or great intelligence, from a metabolic perspective.  They must have a very high energy diet to sustain those powers.  I don’t know what’s in those berries, exactly, but I suspect it’s got a lot more of a kick than the standard fructose/sucrose mix you find in fruits like apples.  An entire Pokémon ecosystem has a number of specialised organisms – powerful Grass Pokémon, for instance – who help to cycle energy around and increase the efficiency of the whole thing by accelerating growth and decay, but we’re still looking at a world populated by organisms who consume and use a fundamentally ridiculous amount of cellular energy on a daily basis.  Now, to an organism whose energy requirements are relatively frugal by comparison, this looks like a very attractive environment – sure, predators and competitors are both very dangerous and powerful, but you can live for a week on the equivalent of a bunch of grapes and half a banana, and you can easily outbreed them.  Humans, I think, found a niche for themselves within that context by doing something slightly different, based on taking interspecies cooperation (something we see a lot of in the Pokémon world, even in nature) to a whole new level of organisation and complexity, which they can do because of pretty much the same things that got us ahead in the real world – namely intelligence and complex languages.

We could probably go on at this for a while, but I think that’s enough for today.

What is your opinion on the accusation that the female Pokémon characters’ outfits are sexist because all or most of them show a lot of leg?’

Never really thought about it, to be honest.  I’m not sure where one draws the line between “Japanese fashion” and “objectification,” especially considering that sexism is a problem in Japan, and comes with its own cultural baggage and history that’s quite different to that of sexism in ‘the West,’ broadly defined, and with which I’m not terribly familiar…
I do believe most of their designers are male (or at least I don’t recall ever hearing about the work of a female designer at Game Freak, and the in-game representations of the company offices in Celadon City, Castelia City and so forth are overwhelmingly male-dominated, from memory), which is sort of unfortunate because it means they’re less likely to have considered it in those terms.  But I think I’ll just stop now, before I offend someone by babbling about subjects of which I know next to nothing.