One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
After reading and writing so much about Pokémon, are there any traditional Japanese folktales or myths you find particularly interesting? Would love to know what a classicist like yourself think about Japanese folklore! 🙂
Honestly for me the takeaway from it all has been that I clearly don’t know enough about Japanese folklore to talk about it properly – mostly I just know the bits that have Pokémon based on them. If anyone would like to recommend some introductory books…?
I’ve been listening to all the NPCs in Kalos out of boredom and noticed some weird things. One of them says the Beauty and the Beast story is about a prince that turned into a pokémon, and there’s a portrait of AZ that supposedly had to have been made 3000 years ago; which is a renaissance-style painting. Did GF realize how anachronistic that is for a time when portraits were done on Greek pottery and Egyptian bedrock murals?
Okay so there’s sort of two parts to this question – do we expect developments in the history of art and technology in the Pokémon world to mirror those of the real world, and exactly how much do you know about ancient portraiture?
Continue reading “VikingBoyBilly asks:”I have to read a paper on “Celtoscepticism” for a Middle Welsh course I’m taking. Archaeology is such a bizarre discipline. How do you guys get anything done?
Well, I don’t know what Celtoscepticism is because Celtic civilisation is very much not my area, but to answer your question with another question… what on earth makes you think we get anything done?
Welcome back! How was it?
Okay so
What you have to understand is that archaeology is pain.
You get up at 5:00 am, swing a pickaxe all morning in the Greek summer heat, have intense debates about whether the soil at one end of your trench is a slightly different shade of brown than the soil at the other end, spend an hour or so each day cleaning the dirt to make sure the dirt isn’t dirty, have lunch which is Greek salad every day for a month, wash bits of broken pottery all afternoon, label every last goddamn fragment, have Greek salad again for dinner, get about five and a half hours of sleep, and then do it all over again.
Then at the end you go home and tell everyone it was amazing and you can’t wait to do it again next year, and somehow that’s true.
We’re strange people.
Since you are an archeologist-kinda guy and also from the Pacific Ocean, is it your big dream to discover remnants of the lost continent, Mu?
…no? Not to be abrasive, but… I’m rather more interested in discovering things that exist. You can’t “lose” a continent; there would be geological evidence for it.
Who is/are your favorite Classical mythological figure(s)? Me, I’ve always been partial to Prometheus and Hephaestus (what can I say, I’m a sucker for fiery things, and Fire’s my favorite type! :P)
You know, I don’t think I really have one. I probably should because I’m a classicist and stuff, and I talked about it with Jim the Editor (who is a classicist as well) for like an hour about it and came to no particular consensus, so I’m just going to go with something interesting and non-obvious and say Helen, just because she’s such a complex and controversial character. Like, you have Homer’s version in the Iliad, where she is vilified by pretty much all the Greeks and some of the Trojans while simultaneously being the exact thing they’re supposedly all fighting over, and she knows it. She is well aware that everyone blames her for this terrible war, and she kinda blames herself for it too, because even if she wasn’t really in control of anything that happened, how could you not, in her position? And there is this one amazing scene where she calls out Aphrodite – the goddess of sexuality, the source of what little power a woman can ever have in Helen’s world – for all the awful bull$#!t she’s been put through over the years because of her beauty. And true, Aphrodite does immediately slap her down for it, but the thing is, no one else in Homer ever talks back to a goddess the way Helen does; they talk to each other about the awful things the gods do to them, but no one will ever actually say it to their faces (or at least not knowingly), because that’s the kind of thing that gets your ass smited, big time.
Continue reading “Anonymous asks:”Why are non-sexual relationships named after Plato?
It comes from a bit in Plato’s Symposium where he has Socrates talk about there being two different kinds of love, one that stems from admiration of the body and leads the lover to loads and loads of awesome sex, and one that stems from admiration of the mind and leads the lover to self-improvement and contemplation of the divine (and of course because Plato is a philosopher he thinks the second kind is obviously superior). It’s actually sort of a misnomer, though, because the way Plato describes the second kind of love, it’s not sexual, but it kind of is romantic, and really a lot more specific than what we tend to mean when we talk about “Platonic love” in modern English.
In 2007 a Roman lighthouse was discovered in Istanbul. Comment?
…not 100% sure what you’re asking here. Istanbul (Constantinople) was at one point the capital of the Roman Empire, and as a major port city it’s a perfectly tenable place to put a lighthouse. It would make a good deal more sense than finding a Chinese lighthouse in Zurich, I can tell you that.
You do old stuff, do you know the civilization games? Why is Alexander the leader of the Greeks?! He wasn’t even Greek, right?
Ohhhhhhhhhh boy; you have no idea of the can of worms you just opened.
As luck would have it I actually gave a presentation on this yesterday so buckle the f#$% up, kids.
Continue reading “Anonymous asks:”If Aphrodite were an important pkmn trainer (respected one, leader, champion, etc.) what would be her team and strategy? More over, how would you design an Aphrodite-based pokemon?
Well, “strategy,” in the vaguest possible sense of the word, would involve everything knowing Attract, and probably as many other delaying techniques as possible. Aphrodite is not a confrontational goddess – she “fights” in the Trojan War, for instance, but in her case “fighting” is more floating around doing vaguely protective motions towards heroes she likes, taking Paris out of the battle when he’s about to get murdered by Menelaus, that sort of thing. So lots of moves that heal, protect, delay, and so on. Milotic is obligatory, since she’s seen as an ideal of beauty in the Pokémon world, and the Milo- part of her name is thought to be in reference to the Venus de Milo. Cloyster makes a lot of sense, in reference to the famous Botticelli painting The Birth of Venus, which has her rising out of the ocean on a scallop shell. Sparrows and doves are sacred to Aphrodite, and probably the closest we’ve got to that is Pidove, but I’ll take a bit of artistic license and give her an Altaria. Swoobat, for the heart motif. Heatmor for her husband, Hephaistos, and a big scary Fighting-type, maybe Infernape, for her lover, Ares.
As for designing a Pokémon… to be honest I’m not particularly inspired by the idea of something directly “based” on a character normally depicted in human form; I don’t really think that allows you to do anything terribly interesting. Mechanically speaking, I think it would be really interesting to make a Pokémon that somehow tries to make Attract not suck, probably using custom abilities or moves; if I wanted to bring Aphrodite into that somehow I would probably do it by basing said Pokémon on one of her sacred animals – sparrow, dove, swan, dolphin, or maybe even her sacred plant, the myrtle, but I’m not sure that necessarily would add anything to the idea of a Pokémon that fights with infatuation.
Pokémaniacal 