Category: Other Gaming/Pop Culture Questions

Gsgdgd asks:

If there were one show you wanted your entire audience to watch, what would it be?

I’m not sure there is one; I don’t watch a lot of TV.  Um, I’m watching Schitt’s Creek right now and enjoying that; a little while ago I watched Bojack Horseman, which I thought was fantastic.  I watched the first season of Bridgerton with my mum; that was fun.  I don’t think any of those amount to “my entire audience should watch this.”  Jim the Editor and my brother both want me to watch One Punch Man, but I have yet to start it.  None of this answers your question.  Um.  I dunno, probably Black Books, honestly.  It’s a British sitcom about a misanthropic Irish drunkard who owns a bookshop in London (3 seasons of 6 20-minute episodes each).  It’s all on Netflix, or here on Youtube if you don’t have Netflix (whoever owns the rights, they don’t seem to care about getting it taken down).  The humour is… very 90s/early 00s British, in a way that has not seemed to resonate with Americans I’ve attempted to share the series with in the past, so I wouldn’t guarantee that everyone will like it, but… y’know, give it a go.

Ace Trainer Fox asks:

If you had to make a pokemon team for each of the original digidestined: Tai, Matt, T.K., Izzy, Mimi, Joe, Sora, and Koiri(using the dub names here, also can’t spell Koiri’s, Kairi’s? name) what pokemon would you pick for each that shows off their individual personalities and abilities?

[This question actually landed in my inbox before I started that series doing this same thing for Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I just have a huge queue of questions and this particular one took a while to answer; it’s a total coincidence that it’s kind of on-theme.]

Hmmmm… let me see… we’ve got to get Pokémon that at least vaguely resemble their Digimon partners and their powers, and we’ve also got to get Pokémon that can stand for the virtues of their Crests, as well as for notable traits of their personalities.

Tai:

I think Tai mainly uses Fire-types like Agumon and Greymon; obviously he needs a Charizard, and I think Arcanine is a good match for his Crest of Courage.  He has a somewhat reckless and impulsive nature, so I think we should add something like Primeape.  I feel like we should include something for SkullGreymon – Houndoom, maybe?  Tai and Sora play soccer together and I think they both have Cinderace that they got at the same time.  Nidoking kinda straddles his transition from risk-taking idiot to actual leader, and is another dinosaur-like Pokémon.

Continue reading “Ace Trainer Fox asks:” →

Son of Iris asks:

I know this blog is about Pokemon, but due to your recent chain on twitter about a Percy Jackson TV series, how would you rate & rank each of Riordan’s books, at least the ones you have read in full.

honestly, dude, I’ve had so many classics questions coming in lately I don’t actually know what this blog is anymore

I’m not going to do a whole rank-and-rate numbered list thing, because… frankly there’s a lot of them.  That just sounds like more work than I want to do, especially since it’s been a while since I read most of them; like, the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians books came out when I was a teenager and I don’t think I’ve reread any of them in full since then; I also haven’t read book 4 of Trials of Apollo yet.  I think the Magnus Chase books are probably my favourites in the Percy Jackson ‘verse, which is not entirely because of Alex Fierro but honestly that’s a pretty significant factor.  I think those books are also a really good example of how minority representation in fiction is good, not just for people who don’t often get to see characters like them in media, but because working with diverse perspectives can actually make a story just flat-out more interesting.  Riordan’s whole schtick is reinventing mythology as a presence in the modern world, and that just works better with the widest possible range of character backgrounds.

Continue reading “Son of Iris asks:” →

Rane and Alleen ask:

Who was right, Aegon or Rhaenyra?

So, I didn’t know the deep lore of A Song of Ice and Fire well enough to remember on  my own exactly who Aegon and Rhaenyra are or what there was for either of them to be right about, so take this with a grain of salt… but I talked to Jim the Editor about this and read part of a wiki article, and it seems pretty clear-cut that Rhaenyra was the rightful heir and got fµ¢£ed over?  I mean… it’s A Song of Ice and Fire so obviously the whole story is ridiculously complicated and I assume everyone involved was absolutely awful in one way or another, but the actual inciting dispute of the civil war feels to me like an open-and-shut case.

Aliens ask:

If you have Facebook, (although I’m sure you can find it elsewhere). I highly recommend you looking up Nathan Pyle alien comics, they’re really funny and I thought maybe you’d like them. If not, oh well! Have a good day.

I do have Facebook, because I am definitely not an alien myself and have been living on earth for a number of years my whole life. I only have a personal page though, not a page for this blog. Maybe I should start one? Uggh, but that’s one more thing to manage. Maybe once I get used to having a Twitter (which I predict will be some time around 2024).

But anyway, yeah, I know these!  A friend of mine shared a bunch of them to her Facebook wall recently.  They’re fun!  I… don’t think I have anything to add to that, but yes!

Team Hufflepuff asks:

What are your thoughts on the Harry Potter books/films?

Well, I grew up with the books (I remember Deathly Hallows being released in my last year of high school, and trolling everyone in my Latin class by yelling out “Voldemort is Harry’s father!”), but I haven’t read them in a while.  I think I only saw the first three movies in cinemas, but I’ve watched the rest on my somewhat regular 15-hour trans-Pacific flights to visit my family in New Zealand (I watch a lot of movies on planes).  They’re not super-important to me as, like, formative inspirational building blocks of my developing psyche, but I always enjoyed the books, and they’re part of the general late 90s/early 00s cultural milieu that shaped a lot of people in my age group, same as Pokémon was.

I have taken the Pottermore sorting hat quiz – the definitive quiz, which bears the imprimatur of the Sainted Rowling – a number of times, and have historically been borderline Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw, but my year in Greece may have made me more adventurous and strengthened my convictions, and my most recent result was actually Gryffindor, which was something of a surprise to me.

Intersections with this blog’s normal schtick are of course rare, but you might be interested in an article I wrote shortly after the advent of Pokémon Go, in which I discussed the philosophies of the three competing teams and attempted to link them to (among other things) the values of the Hogwarts houses.

Also, I think that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (the first one; I haven’t seen the second) is a really solid live-action Pokémon movie, and is the standard against which Detective Pikachu should be judged.

Random Access asks:

Have you been watching teamfourstar’s Final Fantasy VII: Machinabriged?

I have, but to be honest I’m not terribly enthused by it.  I think the somewhat more freeform nature of the story after the characters leave Midgar City, with less interaction between the members of Cloud’s party, makes it difficult to abridge, because it’s very much a plot-driven story with a couple of nice character moments, not a character-driven story that also has a decent plot.  It’s an RPG; it’s intentionally designed to give you space to interpret the characters yourself, which is great in its way, but doesn’t give you that much material for parody in the way that Team Four Star’s flagship abridgement, Dragonball Z, does.

Anonymous asks:

Are you a superhero fan at all? Comics, movies, TV series, cartoons, games, anything?

Not particularly.  I’ve watched a fair bit of Arrow and The Flash, and some movies here and there (I really enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy, which… I don’t know, is that still a “superhero” movie because it’s Marvel, or is it sci-fi?  What are the boundaries there?) but I don’t go out of my way to engage with superhero stuff, and I wouldn’t have called myself a fan of the genre broadly.