Author: pokemaniacchris

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of Pokemon obviously designed to be sexualized like Lopunny? I think it’s really creepy myself, and can’t stand playing with them in Pokemon amie because they keep giving me giggles, hip shakes, hair/ear flips, and generally acting like they’re trying to flirt with me. Not to mention in their first sprites, their elbows were deliberatly placed to make it look like they have breasts. It’s really screwed up, and feels like a desperate attempt to pander to “adult” demographics.

To be honest it’s not something that’s ever bothered me a great deal.  I mean, I think it’s silly, and doesn’t make for interesting designs, but I’ve never had the kind of visceral discomfort with it that you seem to.  Nor do I quite see what you mean about Lopunny’s fourth-generation sprites, although I suppose they could be taken that way.  I will say it seems like a very odd choice to me, given the ‘family-friendly’ image that Nintendo has always tried to cultivate, and Game Freak’s obvious discomfort with saying anything explicit about how ‘breeding’ works.  The disconnect leads me to suspect that there’s some level of cultural nuance here that that the Western audience just isn’t quite getting, and I don’t really know enough about the Japanese to probe the matter any further.

Anonymous asks:

I was re-reading your old Unova entries, and your one on Scraggy and Scrafty really annoys me. What is it about modern subcultures that make them inherently worse than mythology or biology? And besides, Scraggy and Scrafty are based on various features real life reptiles have, just viewed under an anthropmorphic lens. You complain it breaks your suspension of disbelief to see it so clearly based off human concepts, but never clarify why seeing human icons such as thunderbolts and letters don’t.

Point of clarification first: “complained,” not “complain;” this was almost four and a half years ago and honestly I’m not sure it reflects my current views terribly well nor am I motivated to spend a lot of time defending it, but since you ask…

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vikingboybilly asks:

I think the problem with hail is that it gives benefits ONLY to ice types, whereas the other weathers splash around benefits to electric, grass, ground and steel types. Any ideas to give other types advantages in hail?

It doesn’t even benefit Ice-types, really, so much as not disadvantage them… that is, unless they have Blizzard, Ice Body or Snow Cloak.  I sort of think it would make sense to add something analogous to Sandstorm’s bonus for Rock-types and say that Hail gives Ice-types +50% physical defence.  It’s hard to think of anything that makes thematic sense with Hail as a benefit for types other than Ice, though, which is probably why Game Freak has never done it.  You might be able to come up with something that makes sense for Water-types, I suppose, but they already have bonuses from rain, so screw them.  You could, however, make the penalties more severe for some types in particular – defence penalties for Rock and Steel, for instance, on the grounds that rapid cooling makes materials more brittle, which would add more to Hail’s ability to wear opponents down.  Or perhaps Hail could do more damage to Pokémon that are weak to Ice attacks, which gives a bit more variance to how teams with different compositions are affected by it.  At the moment the only real way to build a Hail team is to put several Ice-types on it, but if there are some Pokémon who are weakened significantly more than most by Hail, there will be others who are in a position to take advantage of that.

Anonymous asks:

Murkrow and Honchkrow vs. Misdreavous and Mismagius, purely on a design/concept level.

Well, I guess I would say that I think Misdreavus and Mismagius seem to hold together in a more coherent fashion.  With Murkrow and Honchkrow there seems to be this weird disconnect, where Murkrow is all about witchcraft, superstition and misfortune, but then Honchkrow is… like, a mob boss for some reason?  I can kind of see links there, don’t get me wrong – the Mafia are Italian, and Italians are a superstitious lot; Honchkrow apparently gets called “the Summoner of Night” for his role in leading groups of Murkrow, which sounds a lot more like a name you’d give to the master of a coven of witches than to a Mafia Don; Murkrow steals and hoards shiny things, so an association with criminality isn’t out of the question.  But there just isn’t anything there, for me, that ties it all together.  Honchkrow is just… odd, as an evolution from Murkrow.  On the other hand, that same mix of different influences kind of makes them more interesting Pokémon to me than Misdreavus and Mismagius, somehow.  There’s stuff about Murkrow and Honchkrow that demands explanation in a way that isn’t the case for Misdreavus and Mismagius; you can imagine weird stuff about their social structures, and their existence kind of suggests some odd overlap between organised crime and superstition or witchcraft in the Pokémon world, which is the sort of curious place that makes a good starting point for telling a story.  So… “hmmmm…” is what it comes down to, more or less.