Pokémon Moon, Episode 2: In Which I Am Seduced By The Opulence Of Metropolitan Life

After getting my Pokédex sufficiently haunted, the next stop is apparently the Hau’oli Outskirts Pokémon Centre. Alolan Pokémon Centres have incorporated Pokémarts, in the style of their Unovan and Kalosian counterparts, but also have cafés for the region’s countless tourists to sit and relax. The café serves some items we recognise from older games, including Lemonade and Moomoo Milk, but these aren’t healing items for your Pokémon anymore; they’re purely for the enjoyment of the trainer. The café’s real gameplay purpose seems to be to provide treats for your Pokémon that come free with your drinks – Pokébeans to feed them in the Refresh screen, Sweet Hearts and imported Lumiose Galettes to heal injuries or status ailments, and even the occasional Rare Candy. The barista is also a fount of gossip and dubiously useful life advice. It’s an atmospheric addition more than anything else, and not particularly significant, but it’s also the first damn moment I’ve been allowed to feel like I’m actually on holiday, so I linger in the café for a while longer, trying to ask the barista in increasingly overt and desperate terms for “something a little stronger,” before Lillie shows up and drags me to our next destination…

…the Hau’oli trainers’ school.

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Pokémon Moon, Episode 1: In Which I Am Rescued From Certain Death By An Island Deity

All I wanted was a goddamn holiday.

“Come to sunny Alola,” the brochures said. “Let all your cares wash away,” they said. “Relax on the beach and enjoy the sunset with a glass of cool Pinap juice,” they said. “Immerse yourself in the vibrant local culture,” they said.

The brochures did not mention roads blocked by irritable Tauros, strange waifish girls with dangerous and suicidal cosmic Pokémon, “quests” handed out by mysterious and fickle gods, ritualised duels to please the aforementioned fickle gods, or anything that might be described as a series of “trials.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Anonymous asks:

Do you like Italian food?

Not really. I don’t like cheese, wine or coffee, and that’s like 60% of the Italian diet right there. Aaaaaand then I decided to be a Roman archaeologist, so I have to go to Italy for work from time to time…

Anonymous asks:

Can you PLEASE talk about why Pokemon aren’t slaves? I’m tired of that being thrown at Pokemon as an insult.

You probably want to start here – my “Ethics of Pokémon Training” is by a fair margin the most popular thing I’ve ever written. I essentially try to argue here that the act of catching a Pokémon represents a sort of ritualised contract that is made between a Pokémon and a trainer, and that this contract can be broken by either party. You can also read this, where I compare Pokémon to professional gladiators and Greek teachers and doctors under the Roman Empire, who were technically slaves but in some cases got a pretty good deal out of it. See also here, here and here.

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Pokémon Generations: Episodes 15 and 16

I’m a big fan of episode 16 of Generations; 15 is nothing special, but it covers characters who were already quite interesting, so it’s worth looking at anyway. 15 is the last of the generation V episodes, and focuses on the confrontation between N and Ghetsis in Black and White 2, while 16 is the beginning of generation VI, and is all about the characterisation of X and Y’s main antagonist, Lysandre. 15 follows the games quite closely, but 16 is a bit more exploratory, and it’s when Generations tries to depart a little from the games, and show the bits of backstory that we haven’t seen before, that it does its best work. Let’s take a look.

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Anonymous asks:

Also, Drayden IS pretty hot

Eh. I mean, sure, I can see it, but he’s not really my type. Too gruff and beardy. And how old do you think he is? Dude’s been kicking around since before Pokéballs were a thing, supposedly. He’s gotta be pushing 80, at least.

Anonymous asks:

What’d you think of Homestuck’s ending?

I liked it. I know a lot of people were disappointed, and thought it left too many loose ends, which I think is sort of fine, in a way, because so much of Homestuck’s aesthetic is “random $#!t happening for no reason,” and there are times when it explicitly calls itself out for that. We see enough of the happy ending stuff to fill in the blanks, I think. Although I will grant you I’m still not entirely sure what Vriska did to destroy Lord English.

Cheshs asks:

You have no idea how excited I am for your opinions on S/M. The story was phenomenal, I loved the characters, all the new Pokemon, plot twists I didn’t expect … I genuinely and eagerly await your thoughts when you get the game! I just beat the main story with 58 hours clocked in.

An anonymous user also says, on a similar note:
“i’m genuinely excited for you to start gen VII because the new features remind me a ton of your “if I were in charge” series”

Well, colour me intrigued! I thought generation VI was very well-done all around, and I approved heartily of a number of its new features, which addressed a number of the same things that “If I Were In Charge” was supposed to; I’m excited to see how VII might build on that design philosophy. I’m scheduled to crawl out from under my spoiler-proof rock and begin my journey in Alola this Sunday (the 11th), so you can expect my initial ramblings either that day or the next.

Anonymous:

How do you think Pokemon breed?

…hoooooo boy.

So I wrote this thing about it once upon a time, and I think the big takeaway from it should be not so much anything I actually said, but that we know so little, and what we do know makes such little sense, that you can pretty much say just about anything and have it be on some level justifiable. Game Freak has always been quite insistent in telling us that there’s an awful lot about Pokémon reproduction that no-one knows at all. Back in the original Gold and Silver, a Pokémon egg was supposedly a major discovery because before then, no-one actually knew for sure that Pokémon hatched from eggs, which sort of makes you wonder how Pokémon ranchers and the like ever managed to do their jobs. Then in X and Y, sensing that we foolishly thought we knew what we were talking about, Game Freak decided to remind us that we don’t know a damn thing by telling us that Pokémon eggs aren’t really eggs. At this point you could tell me that Pokémon come from spontaneous generation and I wouldn’t quite be willing to rule it out (I mean, I’m also on the record as suggesting – only half-jokingly – that Pokémon originally evolved from rocks, so it’s not like I’ve got a whole lot of credibility to protect here).