Big Fan Love Your Work asks:

I didn’t want to ask, but I feel like someone – if not me or your own train of thinking – was going to eventually regardless: do you have any personal feelings on the stance of this “Dexit”? It’s a pretty volatile situation so I can understand not wanting to take a side, but it’s really, uh … blown up.

You are correct, but a little bit late – it’s already happened.
https://pokemaniacal.com/2019/06/25/herald-of-opera-asks/
When we first found out about all this, I, in my usual infuriatingly contrarian way, felt that it was a relatively minor piece of news about something that was eventually inevitable, and basically stopped thinking about it until I realised that the rest of the Pokémon community was in the process of declaring a holy war over it. That post contains pretty much all I care to say about the matter; people are welcome to argue about it in the comments, but I shall ignore them.

Ash=Cash to GameFreak asks:

Did your favorite Pokemon make it into SwSh, or did it get snapped in the purge of Dexit?

Don’t know. I gather all of this has been leaked now, but I haven’t looked at any of it, and I don’t plan to. Last I checked, there was no official evidence that mine was in there, and I don’t think it’s particularly a must-include one.

If you want to check it for yourself, my favourite Pokémon is Vileplume.

A Pokémon Trainer is You! IX: Pidgey Minus Minun Equals…?

Last time, on A Pokémon Trainer Is You:

How do you handle the battle between Thingummy’s Pidgey and your Minun, Nancy the Negator?
– Bring Pidgey down with Thunder Wave and fight it on the ground.

You scan the valley floor where Nancy is facing off against Sapphire’s Pidgey, flapping its wings energetically to stay in the air. Nancy can’t directly blast Pidgey with a Thundershock or something – as far as you know, she just doesn’t know the techniques – and she isn’t going to be able to fight an airborne opponent effectively with basic physical attacks. There are a lot of stray boulders, and Nancy can gain some altitude by scaling the wall of the gorge, but this will still be tricky. So… don’t fight it in the air. There’s more than one way to skin a Meowth, after all.

Continue reading →

State of the Blog: October

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hello

This month didn’t exactly go according to plan, because I lost most of a week to illness (I’m fine now, don’t worry; I had a bad fever for a while and spent a lot of time hobbling between my couch and my bed, calling down dire imprecations upon the eternal forces of disease that assail the mortal form) and then had to catch up on real-world work. Which, well, people seem to like it when I talk about my research, so – I’ve been hanging out a lot in the X-ray lab at my university’s geology department, preparing the ancient glass samples I brought back from Caesarea Maritima over the summer for chemical analysis. Each piece gets ground up in an agate ball mill to create a fine powder, I wear a sort of gas mask thing so I don’t get silicosis from breathing in glass dust for hours, then we mix a tiny bit of powder from each sample with a lithium borate flux and melt it down so it turns back into glass, but now it’s a nice neat disc of glass with no air bubbles. Also all the discs are a sort of faint brownish colour, whereas most of the glass I started with is blue-green; I think that’s probably the result of iron in the glass being oxidised from Fe (II) to Fe (III) in the fusion process. Then we zap those discs with X-rays, 10 at a time, each batch for one day, and the pattern of absorption and re-emission of the different wavelengths shows the elemental composition of the sample. Very exciting in principle; some of the thrill gets taken out a bit by the fact that it takes weeks. I’m interested mainly to see whether these window glass samples I’ve taken are different in composition from what’s typical for Roman vessel glass, and also whether there’s any clear variation over the lifetime of the site.

So that’s what I’m doing.

Anyway, I wanted to have an article on Team Rainbow Rocket done by now, and it isn’t, but I am working on it and it should be good to go in another couple of days. We’re running out of time before Sword and Shield come out, and I have preordered one so I will be starting the game pretty much immediately, which I have never actually done before (honestly I think the whole idea of needing to have the game on launch day is a bit weird, but I suppose as someone who produces #content on the #internet I should keep up to date). I’ll try to get something else out between now and then, probably on the Alolan forms, and then once I start the games I’ll produce some kind of “first impressions” series along the lines of what I did for Alpha Sapphire. And… oh god… then the Pokémon reviews will start. And then they will continue until I die. And then once my remaining mortal servants have succeeded in reanimating my shattered body and conjuring my soul back from beyond the veil, maybe we can get on with literally anything else.

Things I have done this month include rambling about Socrates, talking about Galarian Ponyta and Fairy-type life force, rating the moons of the solar system according to rigorous scientific standards, writing two articles for PokéJungle, trying to explain Mimikyu, and continuing my… interactive fan-fic(?) “A Pokémon Trainer Is You!“. Some upcoming questions from readers include: what I would be doing if I weren’t a classicist, how I decide between Pokémon game versions, and what are some of the weirdest of Pokémon’s worldbuilding inconsistencies.

As always, thank you to my Patreon donors whose generosity pays the upkeep of this site, and whose dark will animates the mystic artifices that sustain my wretched material form: Don’t Call Me Bradley, James Crooks, hugh_donnetono, Esserise and Hamish Fyfe. The fact that anyone is willing to donate anything at all as thanks for my ridiculous work is a continuing source of joy and spiritual fulfilment, so thank you! If anyone else out there thinks that my brand of nonsense is deserving of a little monthly tip, please consider taking a look at my Patreon page.

I think that’s everything! The tension is building! Excitement is in the air! The doom of worlds approaches day by day! Help!

Dosidicus Giygas asks:

I enjoyed your PokéJungle piece on Galar. Do you think Sword and Shield might touch on the darker sides of the Industrial Revolution (the immiserated working class, poor environmental conditions, colonialism, etc) as well?

I’m glad you liked it; it’s one of the more… I guess “meaningful” things I feel like I’ve written in a while, and some of the ideas it touches on are, I think, important. (Here it is, for anyone who hasn’t read it)

So… might they? Well, would they? Could they? I might have said no, that Game Freak just isn’t prepared to touch serious real-world stuff like that. They’ll put you into a high-stakes battle against reality-warping entities for the fate of the world, sure, but learning that you and your society might be the things putting the world at risk? That’s another kind of serious. It’s not even that it’s a more adult kind of serious, because a lot of adults don’t enjoy stories like that either. Not even Black and White go there; N asks the questions, but we’re always framed as the good guys, and in the end he sees that we’re right. Then again… a different kind of storytelling, where social ills are as important as “villains,” if not more so… that sounds a lot like the Team Skull plotline of Sun and Moon. It’s always baby steps with this stuff; Pokémon is always an escapist fantasy that imagines an idealised world of harmony between humanity and nature, and we’re not going to see a really “gritty” story that gives a “realistic” portrayal of the evils that came with British industrialisation. If we see things like poverty or environmental damage, they’ll be things that we the players can fight and fix by doing typically heroic things, however unrealistic that might be, because Pokémon is always hopeful. I also don’t think the aesthetic of the presumed “villains,” Team Yell, has much thematic resonance with those ideas. But those societal forms of “darkness” might not be totally off limits anymore either.

A Pokémon Trainer is You! VIII: Seriously, kid, you should know his name by now

Last time, on A Pokémon Trainer Is You:

What do you say to Whatshisname?
– Ask about the health of his Pokémon.

You’re honestly not sure how trainer etiquette is supposed to go in these situations, but it seems to you like the polite thing here is to ask the other guy about how his Pokémon is doing.

“Uh…” He blinks, fumbling for a second. “Squirtle’s doing great. Uh, aren’t you, buddy?” He glances down at Squirtle, who is poking around some brush with Scallion. Squirtle looks back up at him and replies with an affirmative-sounding squeaky grunt. “You know a bunch of nerd stuff, right? Think you’d be able to tell if a Pokémon was sick or hurt?” You do, of course, know a spectacular amount of dumb nerd $#!t, but most of it isn’t directly related to Pokémon health. You can certainly observe a Pokémon’s behaviour and take note of even fairly subtle changes, and it does occur to you that Squirtle seems to have a little more spring in its step, so you tell Prussian(?) as much. They’ve only been together a day and a half, but some Pokémon seem to become more lively just from being in the company of humans; it’s a phenomenon that Professor Oak has always been fascinated by.

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Jim the Editor asks:

What do you think of the Halloween-themed pokemon go designs?

So Jim and I talked about these for a while, and… well, I actually hadn’t given them much thought at all, previously. Hallowe’en is much less of a big deal in New Zealand than it is in the US, and is almost exclusively an event for, like, preteens. Hallowe’en fancy dress parties aren’t really a thing, or at least weren’t for my age group. Jim had a thought, though, which is that these are… well, obviously they’re cute costumes, but also weirdly insensitive, in a way? I mean… Pikachu. You’re dressing up as a Pokémon that knows its true appearance is horrifying and wants to look like you because it’s desperate to be loved. That is in bad taste, Pikachu. You can take that costume off and everyone will still love you. If Mimikyu takes its costume off, everyone will be dead. And you, Charmander – Cubone wear those skulls to mourn their dead mothers, and you’re wearing it because it’s fun to look spooky, you insensitive little $#!t. Squirtle… y’know, I don’t know if this is as bad, but Squirtle, you are dressing up as a Pokémon whose existence is torture and whose own physical form is a constant sorrowful reminder of its own lost life. I just feel like a Yamask might find that offensive, y’know? Bulbasaur… Bulbasaur, you can keep being Shedinja, you’re fine. Shedinja doesn’t give a fµ¢£. I mean, you do also have objectively the $#!ttiest costume but I don’t think you’re doing something actively harmful.

AceTrainerAlvaro asks:

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).

Taking sick leave

I’ve had a bad fever the past couple of days, and I’ve been advised by a doctor to take two days off. It’s probably some viral infection they can’t identify (tests for flu and mono were both negative), so not much to do but take anti-inflammatories and wait it out. Gonna skip this week’s episode of A Pokémon Trainer Is You and probably not post any more reader questions until the weekend.