Not Final Fantasy Friday

Tomorrow morning I am not streaming Final Fantasy X with Jim the Editor, because he is on holiday in Wales and I will be busy performing a dangerous ritual to wrest vast amounts of spiritual power from the land itself at tremendous risk to my life and sanity making toast. But if watching us play a classic game and listening to our opinions on its gameplay, characters, themes, world, story, etc sounds like something you might enjoy, this might be a good time to catch up with the story so far, which you can do here!

An Evil Bag asks:

Now that we have Jellyfish Pokemon based off of stinging jellies and ghost jellies, what are some other hypothetical concepts based of real-world jellies? Like, maybe the box jellyfish or moon jellies, or the Man-0-war.

Also, I think jellies is a funny word, don’t you?

So I have a fun story about the word “jelly,” which is that in New Zealand we don’t use “jelly” to mean a sweet, fruity spread the way it’s used in America; we only say “jam” for the whole category of things that, in US English, are divided into “jams” and “jellies.”  “Jelly” for us means a fruit-flavoured gelatine dessert, which is what the US calls “jello.”  I think this is all true of the UK and Australia as well as New Zealand.  And we have peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches; that is A Thing.  But here’s the thing; I also knew about peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches from American kids’ TV, and I didn’t know that the words meant different things depending on your dialect (it also didn’t help “jelly” is often purple in cartoons and I thought of “jam” as usually being red).  I thought Americans were eating what they would call peanut-butter-and-jello sandwiches, which they made from jars of pre-made jello, and naturally this led me to believe that they were all completely insane.

Anyway yeah I think a Portuguese man o’ war Pokémon would be legit; there’s a lot you could do with that.  A man o’ war isn’t technically a jellyfish at all, it’s a siphonophore, a colony of zillions of microorganisms in several different specialised types and roles.  You could have a unique evolution method where multiple Pokémon of different species combine into one, and you could play on the name and mix some naval motifs into the design, maybe give it an actual sail or some cannons.  There’s space for something interesting there, I think.