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Hello I just found this blog and I ask this one. :) I read this fanfic called, “Almost Like Flying” by Starlingnight. It made me very sad for liking pokemon which made me think, “pokemon don’t rebel because they don’t know any better”. What do you think? :)

I’m not totally sure I understand what you’re asking, but I’ll give this a shot – I’m taking this to mean “why don’t Pokémon rebel against trainers who do bad things?”; is that about right?

I don’t think Pokémon are like most animals – their comprehension of language and abstract concepts seems quite advanced.  Most of them clearly aren’t of human intelligence, but it seems like we’re looking at something much more like a dolphin or a great ape than a lizard or a pigeon, even concerning the… shall we say ‘less gifted’ species of Pokémon out there.  Ash’s Pikachu, at any rate, clearly has at least some degree of understanding of human morality, and the other main human characters’ Pokémon in the anime generally do seem to ‘get it.’  On the other hand most species aren’t concerned with that sort of thing at all in the wild.  They’re perfectly capable of understanding conventional morality, right and wrong, and so on, but it’s just not something they care about unless they’ve specifically been taught to, because their wild communities don’t function in the same way as human societies do.  I suppose what I’m getting at is that saying “they don’t know any better” is one way you could put it, but I don’t think it really gives them enough credit.

You could take a look at these two articles if you want more on the subject:

http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/27548748071/anime-time-episode-54 

http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/34093585438/the-ethics-of-pokemon-training

Some new bits of Pokémon X and Y info got me thinking: being a self-professed dinosaur nerd, what kinds of dinosaurs and/or prehistoric animals would YOU like to see get made into Pokémon?

You know, I would really like to see some more of the weird-ass Cambrian Explosion stuff like Hallucigenia (an animal whose name means “I really gotta lay off the special mushrooms”) played with.  Or, from the Mesozoic, maybe a Spinosaurus, just because I’d be curious to see where Game Freak would take the ‘sail’ thing.  A Spinosaurus’ sail is generally thought to have something to do with regulating body temperature in a hot climate, so the simplest interpretation would be to give it fire- or sun-related powers, but you could take it in other directions too – like thinking of it as a literal sail and working with wind- and water-related abilities.

You keep mentioning that you’re into Classical mythology but don’t know much about Japanese mythology, so I was wondering if there any other mythologies you’re interested in?

Well, classics is sort of my job (or the closest thing I have to one, anyway – I’m a graduate student, but I have a fellowship, so the university pays me for it, rather than the other way round), and knowing the mythology is an important part of the background, so I’ve actually studied a lot of the major texts, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Homeric epics (and, for that matter, some of the texts that are important to our understanding of ancient reception of myth, like Plato’s Republic), at an academic level.  I’m also a TA on a classical myth course at the moment.  Nothing else really comes close to that.  Having said that, when I hear a mythical story I tend to remember it; I guess I know quite a bit about Norse myth (I bought a copy of the poetic Edda the other day; it’s just a matter of finding time to read the damn thing), and probably more than most people about Maori myth (I’m guessing those stories don’t get a lot of exposure outside New Zealand).

Perhaps something along the lines of telescoping generations in aphids? Some species reproduce asexually as well as sexually- females are born pregnant with a genetically identical daughter, and that unborn daughter is already developing a daughter of her own. When mating with males, they lay eggs which can hatch into either males or females. Maybe each newly hatched Kangaskid is already parthenogenically pregnant and gives birth when she becomes Kangaskhan offscreen.

Well, that seems to be more or less what happens, except that there are no male Kangaskhan, which would mean that actual Kangaskhan eggs are a weird anomaly that only ever happen with hybrids, and most of them just clone themselves ad infinitum.  They’re just… kind of a strange species.

I have a theory about why Kangaskhan has a baby in its pouch as soon as it’s born. When a Kangaskhan egg hatches, the baby inside replaces the one in the Kangaskhan’s pouch, while the one previously in the pouch instantly matures into an adult Kangaskhan, complete with baby in pouch. Baby Kangaskhans themselves are simply multicellular versions of egg cells and get genetic information from the father through the mother Kangaskhan’s milk. Thus all Kangaskhan are perpetual mothers. Your thoughts?

So… what you’re saying is that the egg doesn’t actually hatch into a Kangaskhan at all; it hatches into a ‘Kangaskid’ or whatever you want to call it, and that prompts an existing Kangaskid to leave its mother’s pouch and ‘evolve’ (offscreen, as it were) into an adult Kangaskhan, producing another Kangaskid in the process?

It’s… an interesting idea; the trouble is that, in the games, there doesn’t actually need to be another Kangaskhan present in order for an egg to hatch.  You can be wandering around with nothing in your party but a Kangaskhan egg and, say, a Magcargo, and when the egg hatches, you’ll still get a complete set of Kangaskhan + baby (in the anime, on the other hand, there’s nothing all that unusual about seeing a Kangaskhan without a baby, so there’s nothing that needs to be explained anyway).

Do you think the pokemon breeding mechanics should be retconned into producing the lowest evolutionary form of either parent instead of just the mother’s, or are they satisfactory to you as of now?

I’m good with them as they are now.  If you imagine Pokémon breeding as being biologically analogous to real-world animal reproduction (which, of course, is not a given, but let’s assume for the sake of argument), then the young will likely develop inside the body of the female – even if they’re in eggs, it still makes sense that they will follow the basic form of the female parent.  In terms of game mechanics, too, there is a good reason – at present, there is a division between male and female of the things the child receives from its parents: species and (if applicable) Dream World ability from the mother, egg moves from the father.  If you make species inheritable from the father, then that’s another dimension of things you have to watch out for when trying to breed egg moves onto a Pokémon – not only do you have to get the nature and ability you want, preferably with solid stats, the children might not even be the right species!

Do you think it’d be interesting to see items like repels have use in battle? Like, repels could lower the accuracy of physical moves.

Apologies to whoever asked this question (and the other two I’m about to answer) which I received about a month ago, just before I stopped posting… Anyway.

Well… to be honest, I’m not sure what it would add.  Using items in battle isn’t a new thing (potions, X attack, etc.), so it’s not really adding a new dimension to the game, and repels are useful anyway.  Also, apart from repels and escape ropes, I can’t really think of anything you could expend on an in-battle effect that wouldn’t be much more valuable out of battle: Heart Scales and shards are too important for learning moves; stones and fossils are too rare to waste; held items like Leftovers or Choice Specs will be far more useful in the long run if you keep them for your Pokémon to use – you get the idea.  All in all, it just seems like a fairly inconsequential change.