People keep asking you lol. I have one too; which may not be viable an answer but why don’t you? First, I recall pokemon being very big back in the day. Same slavery arguments or not applied. I guess it was 50 split view? Is it still now? Or do more sway towards one way or neutral? Out of curiosity I find that people who believe it is slavery tend to have worse superficial arguments. On pokeballs history. There is a History of Pokémon Training by Dragonfly that talks about it. Critique it?

I’m actually not totally clear on what you’re asking me here, but I can talk about the Cave of Dragonflies article.  I’ve been pointed at it before; it’s interesting.  More than a little ‘out there,’ but it’s not like some of my ideas aren’t just as weird, and more to the point it never claims to be authoritative – just an interesting and speculative way of interpreting what we see.  There are things in it that I like and things that I’m more sceptical about.  Broadly speaking, the narrative makes a lot of sense – humans befriend weak Pokémon; through cooperation and the strategic skills of humans, weak Pokémon become strong; humans formalise and codify strategies to increase their advantages; settlements become secure; travel and communication become freer and easier; after Pokéballs are invented, everything becomes streamlined.  In particular, the notion that wild Pokémon fight trainers because they’re looking for partners, and submit to capture if and when they feel a trainer is worthy, has a lot in common with my own ideas.

One thing that bothers me is the idea that Pokémon have a genetic imperative to seek out competition and that this is universal across all species, because it seems pretty clear that their temperaments and their attitudes to battle vary a lot more than that – it’s hard to imagine characterising, say, Slowpoke or Oddish as “fiercely competitive and [desiring] strength for its own sake.”  I think it’s easier just to say that not all Pokémon do like fighting, which fits well enough with what we see in the anime – and this article actually does say something similar later on, noting that Pokémon who don’t like fighting and don’t want trainers will normally just stay out of our way.  Another potentially objectionable point is that the way apricorns are imagined to work is just so… bizarre.  It’s certainly clever, but the way apricorns are treated in the games and anime seems totally incongruous with the idea that they can eat Pokémon (my own suggestion for dealing with the first apricorn Pokéballs is that their bizarre properties are brought out by the Natural Gift attack, since we know that Natural Gift can make berries do all kinds of weird things).  But yeah.  It’s interesting.  Worth the read.