Regular Bidoof asks:

What are some of your favorite underrated/overlooked pokemon?

Well, I suppose it depends on what we mean by underrated or overlooked… some Pokémon are “overlooked” in that they’ve never been competitively viable, but nonetheless have a sort of cult following, like Dunsparce, whom your mega-evolved counterpart asked about recently, and if allowed, Dunsparce would definitely go on my list. Pokémon that are genuinely overlooked in that they have no fans whatsoever, I mostly kind of think deserve it, like Qwilfish. For some reason I’m very fond of Delibird, who is legitimately terrible, but I don’t know whether there’s a fan following for Delibird. Carbink may not qualify as overlooked because of its link to Diancie, but I do have a weird soft spot for Carbink because I have a pet theory that it’s the oldest of all Pokémon (I reject Mew’s claim on the position, in what I realise is a conflict with established lore). Druddigon is, frankly, my spirit Pokémon, because I too aspire to live in a dark cave and hate everybody, and Druddigon has definitely never had the competitive spotlight and I don’t think has ever been especially popular, so I think “overlooked” is justifiable here. And lastly, my favourite Pokémon is Vileplume, who… isn’t really overlooked or underrated, I don’t think, but has never been, like, top-tier super popular either.

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.

pokemaniacal maniac asks:

fwiw i really really love the first half of the pokemon reviews. I would read entire books about what you had to say lore and inspiration-wise on pretty much every pokemon. i dont play competitively, so the second half is always Just Info to me, but even that has helped me understand the meta as it is, which is also interesting! personally, i would rank the reviews as my favorite thing (and like you said, the sheer scope and the worldbuilding analysis you extrapolate from the pokemon themselves should make you proud) and your If I Ran The Zoo type stuff my second favorite. this is long and rambling but i just have been a long time fan and youre a bright spot on a dark internet and thanks!

[This submission is a response to this]

That’s actually really helpful feedback; thanks! After frankly kind of flubbing generation VII (due in part to unavoidable real-life circumstances, but also due to mismanagement on my part) I want to revise my approach to generation VIII. The first thing is that I don’t think I should write a full narrative-based playthrough journal the way I did for White 2, X and Moon – because that’s fun, and I know a lot of people did enjoy them, but it takes so long, and I think the Pokémon reviews ought to be the highest priority. It would be better, I think, to start those within a month or two of release. And then the reviews themselves I think have become too expansive, and don’t play to my strengths. If I could cut down the competitive stuff (there are better places to go on the internet for that kind of advice; no one needs me for that), and limit that side to just discussion of signature moves and abilities, or moves that cast a particularly interesting light on a Pokémon’s character design, then that, I think, would be a worthwhile economy to pursue. I really want to commit to making sure that this blog’s future includes more of the theoretically dense worldbuilding and games-as-storytelling stuff that inspired “If I Were In Charge,” so trying to slim down the Pokémon reviews and “get them out of the way” is probably a good idea, as long as I can keep the parts of them that my readers value.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

Something’s been on my mind for a long time since I stopped lurking, but I need to say how I feel.

In our long argument about Odysseus, you ended it with “i know what I’m talking about; so there.”

No, you didn’t, because if you did, you wouldn’t have been a misanthrope. Reading mythology is what made me fall in love with humans, and it’s unsettling that you never acknowledged the irony of being a misanthropic archaeologist. The lessons the Oddessey taught me is that life is a journey full challenges and misery, but by keeping your wits and the strength to continue, you can reach your goals. Oddysseus’s goal was to reunite with the wife an son that he loved, and it’s so cynical to think he enjoyed having sex with women that kept him stranded on those islands, and it doesn’t mesh thematically when these are supposed to be a series of hardships. The optimist in me believes this was something to be overcome, either as a temptation like the lotus fruits and sirens, or a situation to get out of like the cyclops. His devotion and loyalty to his crew, his homeland, and family are values I live by, and I don’t like that being tarnished by accusations that he’s a scummy womanizer. I could just be satisfied with my own opinions and not be bothered by what anyone else thinks, but you know what the internet does to us.

I also was put off by your use of the vague buzz-word “western civilization.” It’s nonsensical to anyone with an understanding of geography, and condescending, as if any other civilization doesn’t count (and because I think an archaeologist/anthropologist would only use such a simplification of jargon when talking to a layman). Funny how people angry with the state of the world will defend “western civilization” as the best thing that ever happened.
I hope your outlook of your own species has changed since then, and if you want to reply non-publicly, my email is [REDACTED]

[This is what Billy is referring to – linking to the Tumblr version of the original question-and-answer post rather than the WordPress version because that’s where the relevant comment thread is, but I might actually move it over here for posterity’s sake]

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Katiecat asks:

What do you think happens when we die? (In real life and also in Pokemon)

Well, when I die I usually hang out in the inner ring of the seventh circle of hell with all the rest of the great queer icons of history for a few months while I wait for my acolytes in the earthly world to assemble the all the artefacts, lore and sacrifices necessary to bring about my resurrection. But even souls are subject to entropy, and in the end those too are ground to dust by the constant wear of existence, eventually becoming unable to resist the pull of the Endless Void. Whatever mystical safeguards we place about ourselves to delay our fate – undeath, reincarnation, appeal to the protection of a deity, consumption of the souls of others – sooner or later we all, from the tiniest bacterium to the most ancient celestial leviathans, return to nothingness.

I mean, except for frogs, obviously.

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Mega Bidoof asks:

What do you think about Dunsparce’s enduring appeal despite it’s arguable uselessness?

I’m a big Dunsparce fan myself, and honestly it’s hard to separate how much of that is appreciation for a legitimately neat Pokémon and how much is purely a nostalgia thing. Dunsparce was a cool Pokémon in generation II; it was really rare, and as a kid with no independent internet access in 2000, it was pretty easy to just not know about it until I found one, after I’d already been playing the game for weeks and seen most of Johto (I don’t think there are any AI trainers in the original Gold and Silver that use a Dunsparce; unless you find one by sheer chance, your first hint at their existence comes from a phone call alerting you to a swarm). Almost every time I started a new game on Silver, I made time to stumble around Dark Cave until I found a Dunsparce to catch; sometimes I still do on Soul Silver for old times’ sake.

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N asks:

Did you leave tumblr because they removed the porn?
(But seriously why don’t you like it anymore)

There’s no “anymore” about it; I don’t think I ever really liked Tumblr. I started using it in the first place back in 2012 because a friend recommended it as (I’m paraphrasing) the hip and happening place to be, but frankly it was never very well-suited to the style of my blog. Over the course of 2012-2017, it somehow managed to lose functionality and become harder to use every goddamn time the platform was updated. It’s like the development team were moving backwards in time, starting with a passable, albeit idiosyncratic, blogging platform and gradually breaking or removing every useful capability. For about a year before I left, I’d had to copy-paste my writing into the post editor via my e-mail inbox because if I tried to do it directly from Microsoft Word, Tumblr would decide to convert the text into an image, for some inane and impenetrable reason of its own. The final straw for me (early in 2018, some months before the announcement of the pornpocalypse) was when they arbitrarily changed the HTML editor in a way that broke the captions of every single image I’ve ever put in a text post. WordPress isn’t perfect either: I have to pay for it, I’ll have to pay more if I ever want CSS editing or anything else even remotely interesting, and redoing all the formatting that I lost in the transfer from Tumblr has been (and continues to be) a headache and a half. The editing process is so much less broken and dumb that it’s frankly comical, though. I no longer feel like I have to fight against a platform that wants to impose a contrary vision of what a “blog” is supposed to be. Also, I have to admit that there’s something appealing and official-sounding about having my own .com domain name.

Quriosity asks:

Can you say something about disabilities in the pokemon world?

Well, the Pokémon world certainly seems to have more advanced medical technology than ours; I’m sure a variety of sophisticated prosthetics are well within their capabilities to produce, and probably all manner of other wizardry designed to make life more convenient for people with sensory impairments, mental illnesses, atypical neurological development, and so on. We don’t see much of this in the games or anime, probably because the creative leads prefer to quietly believe that all such difficulties have been either solved or obviated by technology, like most social, medical and environmental problems in the Pokémon universe. But I suspect that’s not what you’re getting at.

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