
House Genesect: Primal Savagery, Modern Supremacy

House Genesect: Primal Savagery, Modern Supremacy
The Ancient Puzzle of Pokémopolis
What happens when you get an actual real-live archaeologist to write a commentary on the episode of the Pokémon anime where they discover a bunch of artefacts from an ancient city? Let’s find out.

At the beginning of this episode, Ash and Brock are having a training battle out in the wilderness when a couple of stray attacks blow a hole in a hillside, revealing a buried shrine. Brock finds a mottled orange dumbbell-shaped object lying on an altar, which is immediately snatched away from him by a young, blue-haired and inexplicably French archaeologist named Eve, who has a whole team of khaki-clad excavators with her. Eve immediately presents the mysterious object to a senior professor in her group, excited because it apparently confirms an extremely important hypothesis of hers. Once Eve’s initial bubbling enthusiasm has subsided, she brings the kids to her dig team’s camp and shows them some of her recent finds. She claims that these artefacts – particularly the dumbbell that the kids just found, and a spoon made of the same orange material – are the first archaeological evidence of the location of an ancient city called Pokémopolis, where humans worshipped Pokémon as symbols of the power of nature. Eve, despite her young age, is apparently the world’s foremost expert on this lost civilisation. Her doting professor tells the kids that she had earned her PhD by the time she was eight years old, and published a best-selling book on Pokémopolis a year later. At the moment, Eve is trying to figure out what to make of a stone tablet with a cryptic and ominous inscription: “Beware the two great powers of destruction. The shadow of the Dark Device will grapple with the prisoner of the Unearthly Urn. The sacred city will be no more as day is swallowed up by night. Darker still for you when they return to lay waste the world, but no human knows the secret to soothe the powers and guide them back to the shadow world.”
Continue reading “Anime Time: Episode 72”
House Meloetta: The Inspired Choice

House Kyurem: Cold as the Void
Welcome back! How was it?
Okay so
What you have to understand is that archaeology is pain.
You get up at 5:00 am, swing a pickaxe all morning in the Greek summer heat, have intense debates about whether the soil at one end of your trench is a slightly different shade of brown than the soil at the other end, spend an hour or so each day cleaning the dirt to make sure the dirt isn’t dirty, have lunch which is Greek salad every day for a month, wash bits of broken pottery all afternoon, label every last goddamn fragment, have Greek salad again for dinner, get about five and a half hours of sleep, and then do it all over again.
Then at the end you go home and tell everyone it was amazing and you can’t wait to do it again next year, and somehow that’s true.
We’re strange people.
Have you read Dating a Team Magma Grunt? It is ridiculously adorable! :3
Okay so I looked it up, and… I don’t like to make a habit of reading and reviewing fan fiction or web comics or whatever, because if I start doing that then everyone will ask me to and it will never bloody end… but yes. Yes it is. And also hilarious.
In regards to your Seven Types, how do you feel about adding Waste, Wind, and Sonic? Waste represents the trash side of Poison, something that would effect Pokemon heavily in-tune with Nature and Magic. Wind would have a greater effect on in-flight Pokemon and light weights while little to no effect on heavy weight or submerged Pokemon. Sonic would effect Pokemon differently based on how sensitive their hearing is. Can you see these three as having a fillable spot in your system?
In reference to this, where I outline a radical condensation of Pokémon’s type chart into just seven attack types (Might, Finesse, Nature, Water, Energy, Magic, Spirit), where Pokémon themselves have no type at all but have weaknesses and resistances by individual species.
So, in regard to these three suggestions – the point of what I was trying to do was have as few types as possible (well, actually, the real point was to think about how I would do a Pokémon game if I were starting completely from scratch, which I’m still thinking about, with a view to maybe writing a long screed of rambling nonsense at some point in the future, but let’s not go down that particular rabbit hole right now). I wanted to see how little I could get away with. So just on philosophical grounds, I don’t think any of these things need to be types. I do think they can be effects that are attached to specific attacks. Sonic I would probably deal with by putting in a Deafness status condition that, say, causes Pokémon to disobey (because they can’t hear your orders properly) and make a couple of Pokémon either especially vulnerable to it (e.g. Zubat, who ‘sees’ with sound) or resistant or outright immune to it (anything with the Soundproof ability, like Mr. Mime). The attacks themselves, I think can just be typeless (which is a thing my system has; they just do normal damage to everything). Wind is similar; I mostly imagined wind-based attacks as belonging mainly to Finesse, with some being dual-typed (another thing my system has – Hurricane as Finesse/Nature, Twister as Finesse/Magic), and all having effects much like the ones you describe; they’re not universally more effective against certain Pokémon, just more effective given certain environmental conditions. Waste… waste is a weird one because one of the ways I wanted to flip things on their head was by having pollutant Pokémon like Koffing and Grimer be vulnerable to Nature attacks, not resistant (not all of the Pokémon that are “Poison” in the existing system, mind you, just those specific ones; other Poison-types could have different vulnerabilities). Poison, like the others, doesn’t need to be a type in itself; just keep it as a status condition that can be worsened or prevented by the traits of certain Pokémon.

House Zekrom: Power through Ideals
You didn’t just miss Go – you also missed regional-variant Pokémon finally being a thing in the games. We now live in a world inhabited by ice-breathing Vulpix and long-necked Exeggutors.
Okay but I missed that deliberately because I avoid spoilers from upcoming Pokémon games and I DIDN’T READ ANY OF WHAT YOU JUST SAID LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENING
So what did all you crazy kids get up to while I was in Greece? Did I miss anyth-HOLY SHIT Pokémon Go