What would be your ideal Grass-type Pokemon, aesthetically, mechanically, conceptually? You’ve said Grass is your favorite type, and you’ve definitely expressed opinions on it before, so I was just wondering: if Game Freak gave you a few sheets of paper and a set of colored pens, what would you come up with?

Mmmrrrrmmm.  Hmm.  Grass Pokémon, to me, can be tranquil but sinister, peaceful but deadly.  More than half of all Grass-types in the first generation were Grass/Poison, you know, and real-world plants are the ultimate source of thousands upon thousands of medically useful chemicals, and ten times as many deadly poisons.  My favourite Grass Pokémon, as you’ve probably heard me mention, is Vileplume.  So… gimme a plant, gimme a plant…

Got one.

In Homer’s Odyssey, there is a short episode where a number of Odysseus’ men, off exploring one of the strange lands they’ve discovered, are taken in by the locals, who are called the Lotophagoi (Lotus-Eaters), and offered a meal of a mysterious fruit, the lotus, that seems to be the only food anyone eats there.  The fruit turns out to be incredibly addictive, and induces a state of bliss in which the men are completely unable to remember who they are, where they come from, or what they are supposed to be doing.  Odysseus and the others have to literally drag them kicking and screaming back to the ships.  So then, how about a Pokémon like that?  A Grass-type that grows mysterious psychoactive fruit which, when eaten, compel other wild Pokémon to do its bidding?  Grass/Psychic or Grass/Fairy could both be justified, and both of them already exist (Exeggutor, Celebi and Whimsicott) but neither is particularly laboured at this point.  I think Grass/Psychic is probably most appropriate, thematically.  ”Because it is still young, this Pokémon’s psychic powers are too weak to influence others, so it offers them the mysterious fruit that grows on its vines in exchange for protection and favours,” then later, after evolving, “A single bite of its tantalising fruit can bring you under its psychic control for hours or even days.  It surrounds itself with other wild Pokémon for protection.”

Now, fun fact about the Homeric lotus – no one is 100% sure what it is.  It’s almost certainly not the plant most commonly referred to as “lotus” today, the sacred lotus flower Nelumbo nucifera, which is native to south east Asia (this is what the lotuses in the first Percy Jackson movie are based on – in the books there is no fruit or flower at all, probably because the author knew better).  Because the historian Herodotus seems to have thought that the Homeric Lotophagoi lived in North Africa, people commonly go with fruit trees native to that region, like the date plum, but a wide variety of interesting candidates has been put forward – possibly the high point of my entire last semester was finding, in the course of research for a presentation on the Odyssey’s portrayal of faraway lands, a legit scholarly article from 1937 which argued, in total seriousness, that the Lotus-Eaters were actually addicted to watermelons.  That being the case, the physical design of this thing would be wide open; at the moment what I’m imagining is a sort of shuffling bush thing with clawed, woody feet, eyes near the base, and long tendrils that sprout from the top and hang down around it, with several different coloured fruits on the ends.  Maybe an actual lotus flower on the top, at the centre of the tendrils, but again, you can sort of go either way on how appropriate that is.  Something like that.