Category: Reader Questions

LadySeychelles asks:

Hey, what are youre thoughts on the gym leaders? I always have fun thinking what they could do in Pokemon society

Well, there seem to be basically three things Gym Leaders do in a community: they test and certify trainers wanting to challenge the Pokémon League, they provide instruction and a learning environment to junior trainers, and they solve people’s Pokémon-related problems.  Most of them – with some notable exceptions, particularly in Kanto – are pillars of the community, well-known and generally trusted.  The last few generations, particularly V and what I’ve seen so far of VII (if we say that the Captains are basically equivalent to Gym Leaders), have been making a very deliberate effort to show that most Gym Leaders also have “day jobs” in addition to their Pokémon-related responsibilities – Cilan and his brothers run a restaurant, Clay is a mining tycoon, Viola is a photographer, Clemont is an electrical engineer, Ilima is a painter, etc.  So it might well be that, in some regions at least, Gym Leaders actually work as volunteers.  These are people who just care so much about Pokémon training that they will devote a significant portion of their own free time to running what is basically an entire sports facility (or, in Alola, administering trials) so that members of the community can learn more about it.  Which I think is pretty neat.

Anonymous asks:

Have you ever read “Children of the Lamp”? I’m really, REALLY new to pokemon, so perhaps there’s something in the anime that I’ve missed, rendering this impossible, but I’ve always thought the inside of pokeballs similar to the inside of the lamps in those series; larger on the inside, with the pokemon having the ability to modify the inside to their liking. Pokemon go in, see it’s comfortable, and like the trainer’s willingness to accommodate them, and end up appreciating the trainer a lot more

I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that series.  It’s sort of fine in theory, but official sources are always very cagey with how Pokémon experience the inside of a Pokéball.  The image below, with Iris’ Dragonite, is the closest thing I’m aware of to an actual depiction of what it’s like (though note that, if it looks grumpy, that’s not necessarily because of conditions inside the Pokéball – “grumpy” is this particular Dragonite’s baseline).  I think originally Pokéballs were imagined to store Pokémon as data in a similar way to the PC network, but then the anime did things that made it clear they were still aware while inside, and could leave at will.  Probably several people at Game Freak have thought something along the lines of what you’re talking about at one time or another, but I’m not sure anyone has ever gone through to see whether it’s consistent with how Pokéballs are portrayed and how they work throughout the series.

RandomAccess asks:

I thought about Pokémon ethics and something occurred to me, Pokémon are dangerous. Of course humans use devices to contain them, it’s the one way we can survive in that hostile world, where there are creatures that can destroy you mind, body, and even soul. The fact that they become tame after capture despite obviously still having free will is incredibly lucky on our part, and shows it’s mutually beneficial, because if they wanted to, they’d destroy us and be rid of us, and we couldn’t stop it

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Anonymous asks:

What do you think is the logic behind Zubat’s Poison typing?

Well, for one thing, Game Freak seem to have disliked the idea of pure Flying-types up until generation V, when we got Tornadus, and it’s not really clear what else Zubat could possibly have been (no Dark type when he was introduced).  For another, vampire bats are technically venomous by some definitions, since their saliva has special properties that inhibit clotting and increase blood flow to the area of a bite.

RandomAccess asks:

Huh, for some reason I thought you were playing Sun, but since the normal trial featured rattatah instead of yungoos, I imagine you’re actually playing Moon. How do you feel about the inverted clock feature?

Well, those entries are titled “Pokémon Moon: Episode 1, 2, 3, etc”…

Anyway.  It actually took me a little while to figure out what was going on, because at the moment I’m in New Zealand for Christmas with my family, but my DS was still set to US eastern time, so in practice the game was… I think six hours behind the actual time of day?  Which is sort of how the game justifies it, of course – Alola is so far away from everything that it’s in a different time zone, and Professor Kukui actually asks you if you’re feeling any jet lag following your arrival from Kanto.  Anyway.  It seems perfectly harmless, and a nice way of emphasising what I assume will be a prominent day/night theme in the games (Yungoos’ Pokédex entry specifically talks about how it’s very active during the day and promptly collapses from exhaustion at dusk, so it makes a sensible opposite to the nocturnal Alolan Dark Rattata).  Depending on your typical play schedule it might become inconvenient, but that’s true of the basic day/night system as well, and you can circumvent it easily enough by just lying to your DS about what time it is, if you really need to.

Anonymous asks:

Why do you think gen-specific Pokemon pairs get unequal treatment by Game Freak? (Eg, Vileplume got a new evolution in Gen 2, while Victreebel got nothing, and Whimsicott was already better than Lilligant even before becoming Fairy-type in Gen 6.)

I suppose because those pairings don’t serve any gameplay purpose beyond the games in which they were originally introduced.  Oddish and Bellsprout were no longer version-exclusive in generation II, so why continue to act as if they were?  If anything, I think it would be pointlessly restrictive for future games to demand that those pairs of Pokémon continue to mirror each other.  If you have an idea for an alternate evolution for Gloom that you think is a good one, why declare it invalid because you don’t have an idea for Weepinbell?  As for Whimsicott getting a buff that Lilligant missed out on by becoming a Fairy-type – well, you’ve hit the nail on the head.  Whimsicott was already better than Lilligant, so clearly they didn’t care in the first place.  Why would they care more in generation VI, when Whimsicott’s special relationship with Lilligant was no longer relevant, than they had in V?

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of Pearls, Nuggets, Mushrooms, and other material commodities in the game that exist only to be sold for ca$h?

Well, it’s not a Pokémon-specific phenomenon.  The general video game term is “vendor trash” – items that serve as a way of giving extra money to the player without having actual physical coins etc. lying around in places that make no sense.  In a lot of games these are things like the pelts of animals, or magical body parts of rare magical creatures.  Obviously that’s no good for Pokémon, so instead we get nuggets.  From an in-universe perspective, well, clearly these items are useless to us, but not necessarily to everyone.  Nuggets are made of gold; pearls can likewise be used for jewellery.  The mushrooms, we know from a chef who will buy them in Black and White, can be used in gourmet cooking.  Rare bones, and the assortment of artefacts from the undersea Undella Ruins, all have tremendous scientific value.  God only knows what comet shards can be used for.