Category: Reader Questions

Vikingboybilly asks:

I hate that third wave feminists complain about Odysseus sleeping with Circe and that random nymph, when they FORCED him to stay with them or they’d let his crew die. It was an act of long-term, consensual rape. Penelope had it way better than him.

…weeeeelllll, I’d hesitate to attribute the idea specifically to third-wave feminists, since there seems to be a hint of it in Penelope’s letter to Odysseus from Ovid’s Heroides (published c. 25 BC, and therefore predating the feminist movement somewhat)… and Odysseus’ stay with Circe lasted a full year after he had defeated her and freed his crew, and is presented as something of a lapse of judgement on his part even by Homer in the Odyssey itself… and in some accounts he has a child with Circe, Telegonus… and I’m assuming that by “that random nymph” you mean Calypso, daughter of the Titan Atlas and mistress of far-flung Ogygia, in which case, well, he does keep sleeping with her even after the gods have ordered her to let him go and they have begun to make preparations for his departure…

…but other than that, yeah, sure.

Anonymous asks:

Can Pokemon consent?

Consent to what, exactly?  I don’t think we have any instances of a Pokémon being able to make a binding legal agreement, and their trainers seem to act in loco parentis with respect to all decisions about their medical treatment.  They clearly have the intellectual capacity to literally agree to do things, though.  My impression is that human law treats them as being roughly analogous to children – but of course neither the games nor the anime spends a lot of time on legal minutiae.  Procedural drama fan fiction about lawyers in the Pokémon universe…?

Anonymous asks:

A post on the internet made me realize that Grant, the Kalos Rock-type Gym Leader, is probably named after Dr. Alan Grant from Jurassic Park, right down to only having dinosaur Pokémon! (not a question, I just thought it was neat, especially since you’ve brought up JP and fossils in Pokémon before)

Well, I think his name is probably more likely to come from granite, actually, though it’s hard to tell because his English name isn’t used for any of the other languages the games are translated into.  But this is certainly a happy coincidence!

Anonymous asks:

how about an FMK but with places? let’s call this “visit, live in, nuke”? idk, i’m just making this up as i go. so, visit, live in, nuke: Verdanturf in Hoenn, Lacunosa in Unova, and Cherrygrove in Johto.

Okay, well, gonna nuke Lacunosa Town because it has a stupid name, as I’m sure you will agree after reading this paragraph taken from my old playthrough journal of White 2: Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

I was reading you latest sm update and when you were talking about how the gods are twerps it reminded me of (i’m so sorry) how umm.. certain kinds of people tend to look at native/pacific islander religions and traditions as silly and superstitious (this isnt a judgement call I SWEAR)

Don’t apologise; I invoked the trope myself in an earlier chapter:

“I mean, I want to get rid of Alola’s whacko bird cults and volcano rituals and freaky voodoo $#!t as much as anyone.  You could at least cut out the human sacrifices.”  Kukui goes stony-faced at that.
“How did you know about-?”
“Didn’t.  I was totally going off random guesswork and thinly-veiled racism.  Until now.  Seriously, dude!?”

The point of the “thinly-veiled racism” line is that (in-character) I just assumed the Alolans practised human sacrifice because they seemed to me like the sort of people who would.

The line you’re talking about is something different, though – the point of that comment was that it was supposed to come from the perspective of someone who actually has dealt with gods before (Giratina, Arceus, etc, whom we have met in previous games)… and has not been impressed.

Anonymous asks:

Are there any Pokémon that you think ought to be retyped?

Mmm… it would have been nice if Masquerain had kept Bug/Water instead of transitioning to Bug/Flying; it would have made him more unique (although I suppose we have Araquanid now, so… eh).  Shinx, Luxio and Luxray would perhaps have been more interesting as Electric/Dark as well, and they have the aesthetic down.  Oh, and definitely Rufflet and Braviary as Fighting/Flying; I think that would have made them much more competent and given them a point of difference from all the other Flying-types.  I don’t think anything else particularly comes to mind… maybe Gothita, Gothorita and Gothitelle as Psychic/Dark but I’m not sure I’m wild about that one.  Minior is… a problem, because it’s nothing like other Flying-types and much more closely resembles a lot of Levitate Pokémon like Lunatone and Solrock, but since it has a defining signature ability you can’t give it Levitate.  Not sure what I would do with that one.

Random Access asks:

No concept of heresy? Wasn’t Socrates put to death for being an atheist though?

It’s not quite the same thing.  Denying the existence of the gods altogether is a problem for them, although in Socrates’ case that was probably just a pretext to get rid of him (as far as we can tell, he wasn’t an atheist at all, at least not in the sense that we understand it).  The late antique and mediaeval notion of heresy, though, presupposes that there are wrong and unholy things to believe about God(s), or wrong and unholy ways to worship God(s), even if no one disputes that he/they exist(s).  For instance, for a 4th century Christian to say that God the Son is inferior to God the Father, when the central authorities of the church believe that they are equal, is heresy (specifically, the Arian heresy) and can get you excommunicated.  There isn’t really any equivalent in the polytheistic religions of the classical period, because they have no dogma and more or less take it for granted that different communities have different ideas about what the gods are, how they act, and how they should be worshipped.

EDIT: An illustrative example.  Hesiod’s Theogony says that Aphrodite was born from the blood of Ouranos, the primordial sky god, when it mixed with the foam of the sea.  Homer’s Iliad says that Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and a minor goddess named Dione.  These are two fundamentally incompatible origin stories for one of the most popular goddesses in the Greek world, and they come from the two most respected and authoritative Greek poets.  You can believe either.  Or neither.  Or even both, if you can wrap your head around it (that was Plato’s answer).  No one particularly cares.

Anonymous asks:

Do you get the impression Gen VI was cut short? Looking back there’s a lot about it that seems unfinished. I’m not the first to think that Zygarde should have had its own game, but the Gen VI events for Diancie, Hoopa and Volcanion are really underwhelming; all they unlock in XY/ORAS is a bit of extra dialogue. Feels like a lot of wasted potential. The fact that Gen VII only has two event Pokemon (and hackers haven’t found a Marshadow event in S/M yet) makes me think this gen will be short too.

A little, yeah.  Mostly what I think is strange is that they built such a unique subsystem for Zygarde with so many interesting little features, and then never really did anything with it.  Clearly some of it was already planned when they produced X and Y; Thousand Arrows and Thousand Waves are both in the code for the generation VI games but were never made obtainable, and Zygarde’s Pokédex data hints at a really important role that it ought to have in the conflict of X and Y. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →