Author: pokemaniacchris

Transcendence

Shalour City at last.  It’s high time I got some answers.

Tower of Mastery

A fairly typical medium-sized Kalosian town on the region’s north coast, Shalour City is dominated by the Tower of Mastery, a monumental walled keep that sits a little way out into the harbour, connected to land by a sand bar.  Part fortress, part observatory, part cathedral, the tower’s asymmetric design hints at a long, storied history and decades, perhaps even centuries, of construction.  It is, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing I have seen on my journey so far.  Staring at the tower, I almost forget what I’m really here for: learning about Mega Evolution and getting revenge on Korrina for slighting me.  According to Trevor and Tierno, who catch up with me in Shalour City, the tower is home to someone known as the Mega Evolution Guru, who should be able to help us.  Tierno also has a gift for me: an ‘intriguing stone,’ a strange round gem with bands of softly blended blue, purple, red and orange.  Tierno wants me to have this because I’m clearly a far stronger trainer than him – good; my inferiors should know their place.  He thinks it’s a Mega Stone, but it doesn’t look like the two Mega Stones I have already.  If anything it reminds me of a piece of Soul Dew, but the colours are much warmer.  I suppose I’ll find out what it does later.

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Yo Yo Yo Pokemaniacal. Has animal fighting implications made you feel awful in pokemon, for example since pokemon look like animals or if you think they are animals despite differences you may think its just animal fighting. A blog named LadyGeekgirl wrote “The Pokémon Problem” on that. Last I checked the blog didn’t have comments but last I saw it was on August lol. And also how is the X and Y plot so far?

Feel awful?  Well, not really.  I’m not sure if you’ve read it, but I have dealt with the subject in some depth in the past – it’s probably the most popular thing I’ve ever written.  Basically it all comes down to how much choice you think the Pokémon have in the matter, and I tend to think the answer is actually “quite a bit.” http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/34093585438/the-ethics-of-pokemon-training

The article you mention – here’s a link, by the way, for other readers http://ladygeekgirl.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/in-brightest-dayish-the-pokemon-problem/ – well… I mean, yes, obviously, the complaints are fair, and I think it’s best if we keep those in mind.  I also think the franchise produces by far its most interesting stories when the developers keep them in mind, and the same goes for fan fiction.  It’s not exactly a clever point, though.  I mean… I don’t think people should get to say “Pokémon portrays violence involving animals” as though it’s a great insight.  Don’t just say it; work with it!

EDIT: Oh, yeah, you asked about X and Y.  Well, I’m not all that far in yet, so I don’t really know.  Still haven’t found out what Team Flare is really all about, or what Lysandre has to do with anything (I mean, I assume he’s important, and the game keeps dropping hints that he’s a bad guy and maybe the leader of Team Flare, but his ethos doesn’t really seem compatible with theirs, so eh?).  I’ll keep everyone posted, of course!

DOUBLE EDIT: People really say “yo yo yo”?

Affairs of Slate

More Pokémon flock to join my cause as I head north from Cyllage City: Snubbul, Houndour, Sigilyph, Yanma, Emolga, Nosepass, Golett, a whole octet of Eevee, and an odd brightly-coloured winged humanoid Pokémon called Hawlucha, a Fighting/Flying dual-type plainly based on a lucha libre wrestler.  I don’t normally like designs that ape human subcultures, but for some reason Hawlucha works for me. 

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All that Glitters

A deep, dark cave filled with beautiful blue and green crystal formations, the Glittering Cave is a treacherous place – you move through it in a first-person perspective, so you can only see what’s right in front of you, making it a lot more difficult to keep track of exactly where you are (luckily, the tunnel systems aren’t that complicated, but this could get tricky if a similar perspective is deployed for, say, Victory Road…). 

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You’ve mentioned before how, in the Pokemon world, no one seems to know how Pokemon breed, which makes professors and breeders seem incompetent. Have you thought maybe that professors and breeders are lying about not knowing? I say this because every single way to experience the Pokemon universe is through the perspective of a 10 year old trainer, a young boy or girl who probably doesn’t know about sex. It would be strange to give random children “the birds and the bees” talk all the time.

It’s more than that, though.  In Gold and Silver, Professor Elm is tremendously excited to hear that Mr. Pokémon is claiming to have a Pokémon egg, because at that point (and there is dialogue elsewhere in the game that confirms this explicitly) no-one even knows for sure that Pokémon hatch from eggs.  Why would anyone be concerned to hide that from a child?

EDIT: Actually, come to think of it, even when you think about the day-care people producing lines like “we don’t know how [the egg] got there, but your Pokémon had it” that’s still bizarre, because why would anyone be uncomfortable telling a child “your Pokémon laid an egg”?  There’s no need at all to mention the sex which presumably preceded it.  Seriously, eggs are, like, the most kid-friendly method of reproduction ever.

There was a joking comic strip that went around about the pokedex entries. Since your character was very young and was filling up the pokedex, then they would be the one to write those entries – and end up with exaggerations because pokemon would just impress them that much.

Continued: “And of course a comic strip from Rare Candy Treatment about “Dexbusters”, who would test pokedex descriptions the same way our Mythbusters would test weird theories.”

I’ve seen both – I don’t think I’m happy to say that something quite so absurd can actually explain what’s going on (I mean, obviously these things were produced with humorous intent), but these depictions might well be close.  I think we should bear in mind that (even if you don’t imagine it actually being written by children on their Pokédex quests) the Pokédex is a field guide for children, not an academic or scientific database.  It probably contains a fair amount of apocrypha, derived from folktale, urban legend, or simple exaggeration, meant to create an impression of what a particular Pokémon is like rather than a scientifically rigorous description.

Question! How do you think that literature and other forms of fiction would have developed in such a ridiculously Pokemon-centric society as the one in the games? Obviously, Pokemon featured prominently in most – if not all – of their ancient myths, but how would storytelling have developed from there? Do you think that similar genres and cliches would exist in the Pokemon world as do in the present-day real world? Would there even be such a thing as a story without Pokemon in it?

Well I don’t see that there’s anything about the Pokémon world that particularly precludes similar narratives and tropes to the ones that exist in our world, although how art and literature deal with Pokémon would presumably vary significantly from one culture to another.  If a culture regards Pokémon as essentially clever animals, then one imagines their literary motifs would develop along fairly familiar lines.  It sort of depends on how willing people are to think of Pokémon as ‘non-human persons,’ and how widely stories that treat them in this way are accepted.  Even then, there certainly have been cultures in the real world that were happy to ascribe free will and agency to animals, and to tell stories that depict them as equal to humans, so I’m not sure the presence of Pokémon per se would prompt them to develop any literary forms that are actually without parallel in the real world.

Into the West

Well, Kore the Floette has been replaced by Daphne the shiny Floette (named for a nymph who turned into a tree as an excuse to get out of a date with the god Apollo) – clearly a superior choice in every way imaginable by virtue of her shininess.  Nothing else of great interest happened during my training program, though.  Once I am satisfied that my off-duty Pokémon have learned enough, I move on to check out the Battle Château, a magnificent old castle straddling what I’m still pretty sure is the Loire River. 

The Battle Château
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