The Pokémon brand remains sheepishly heteronormative (ie, Steven Stone & Wallace are just best guy friends *wink*). On that note, the move Attract should be low-key rejiggered to also affect targets of the same gender, with its overall accuracy reduced somewhat (say down to 85 or 90%) to reflect the slightly lower incidence of same-sex interactions among animals. Frankly, it’s 2019 & kids across the globe are well-aware that LGBTQ people & same-sex “infatuation” (to borrow an in-game term) exist, stop pretending otherwise, Game Freak. Thoughts?
I mean, honestly, I don’t think there’s really any compelling game balance reason you couldn’t just have Attract work on all gendered Pokémon (or even just all Pokémon) with 100% accuracy. That’d still be strictly worse than Confuse Ray was in generations I through VI, because infatuation wears off if either the user or the target switches out, and an attack that fails due to confusion comes with some extra damage (in generation VII, the chance of a confused Pokémon hurting itself drops to 33%, so it’s a bit murkier now, but still; we can always nerf infatuation by a similar amount, just to keep “parattraction” from becoming a frustrating metagame force). All Pokémon are bi now. Really, why not? This isn’t even all that out of step with nature; there are species where same-sex sexual interactions seem to be more common (for one or both sexes) than opposite-sex ones, like giraffes. It doesn’t even have to signify homosexuality if people want to be prudish about it; you can just make it a joke, like “he’s so hot even the straight guys want him,” which is a joke the anime has made with Meowth and a wild Purrloin (also, like… straight guys… there’s one, right? You might not say it out loud, but there’s always one. We share this blessed earth with the corporeal incarnations of Hugh Jackman, Rock “the Dwayne” Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Idris Elba, for goodness’ sake; you’re allowed one). The fact is, we don’t know anything about Pokémon sexuality. Nothing is canon and nothing is sacred; Game Freak have made sure of that. We know it usually takes a male and a female to produce an egg, but the games keep insisting that no one knows how it happens, and also claim that eggs “aren’t really eggs,” and permit all kinds of… anatomically improbable pairings (ArcheOPS WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THAT CLAWITZER). I’m not sure it would make the system any more implausible even if you straight-up allowed Pokémon to breed and produce offspring regardless of gender (there are single-gender species already, and they must reproduce somehow).
Pokémaniacal 
Skitty and Wailord. How do you draw attention to how little sense Pokemon breeding makes without mentioning Skitty and Wailord? (And Seedot is in the same breeding group as they are, which is probably even weirder)
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because it’s cliché and I’ve talked about it before and they are, as you just noted, not even the weirdest
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Honestly, cats and whales are at least both MAMMALS. There are WAY weirder pairings.
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Oh, and then there’s the number of women who realized they were lesbian because of Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, for the “I don’t like guys but I like HIM” point.
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Okay Chris imma have to stop you at the rock- like sure he’s muscled, but HIS HEAD JUST LOOKS LIKE AN EGG
There’s so many hot celebs you coulda picked, like, damn dude
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so, on the one hand, yes
on the other hand, he’s so pure that when he smiles, the sun comes out and birds start singing
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…you acknowledge he’s an egg, but you still think that mister gudetama is an eligible bachelor on account of also being a disney princess?
Because that’s the most beautiful thing I read today.
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While I’ve never been bothered by heteronormativity in Pokémon, I’d support making Attract (and possibly breeding) gender neutral from a mechanics standpoint. Generally, I think it’s a disappointment when a game mechanic, like a status ailment, is useless to the point of being basically irrelevant, so I’d appreciate the buff. Paraflinching, swagplay and such is of course not the coolest strategy in PvP, and infatuation-abuse would obviously work in a similar vein to those strategies, but I think it’d improve in-game battles by making them harder for the player. (Think Whitney, except now no one is safe from Attract!) I think a player who wants to abuse Attract themselves would probably benefit less from this than the AI, so to speak, because the player already has an advantage with Attract as it works now, given that AI trainers usually have Pokémon of a specific gender, removing much of the predictability considerations.
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Infatuation doesn’t always need to reference romantic or sexual drive. I feel like Pokemon could also be enamored with the cuteness of a Pokemon like Eevee or Togepi and not want to cause them harm. You could say the same for being dazzled with the beauty of a Beautify. In fact, I’ve thought of the idea before of replacing Beautifly’s god-awful abilities with an all-new ability that adds a chance to infatuate opposing Pokemon regardless of gender whenever Beautifly switches into battle. Beautifly would still be garbage, just a prettier kind of garbage.
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That’s already the fluff of both the ability that inflicts it on attackers and the upcoming Gigantamax Eevee’s exclusive move… and both are still gender-locked purely because Attract was. -_-
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