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.
Hey, the bombax ceiba is the cotton tree; so what is cottonee, which is not a tree?
There is a tree called a cotton tree, but it’s not actually where cotton comes from, Billy. Cotton comes from a small shrubby thing, and it grows on the plant in little balls to protect the seeds; that’s what Cottonee is.
Lotta good stuff on Wikipedia, y’know.
Okay, listen to this: What if, instead of breeding eggs, pokemon trained each other by playing at the day care, giving their IVs, egg moves, or abilities to the other pokemon, and your pokemon can reach it’s full potential by learning and growing from the other pokemon at the day care instead of ridiculous egg breeding chains? This could be controlled with the power items and everstones and such, but it might work a little differenty (The power bracer’d pokemon get the attack IV from the other
You know, I think I like that, or something along those lines anyway. I talked a bit in one of these old things about expanding the complexity and interactivity of Pokémon storage, placing a bit more emphasis on what your Pokémon are getting up to when they’re not actually with you, and this kind of thing might play into that kind of aim really well. I think it reinforces the sense you get of Pokémon as individuals if they help each other to learn and grow, rather than just keeping it as the sole responsibility of the trainer. There’s a lot of scope there for, say, the combinations of Pokémon’s natures having different effects on each other, or for abilities that (in addition to their battle effects) alter the way Pokémon can interact with each other in the day care. Maybe Pokémon that have trained together will be more effective in double or triple battles together? Lots of different directions you could take it.
What are your feelings in the whole Pika close thing? Like that fact that they keep making them, and do any of them really stick out to you?
Urrrrrrrgh. Eh. I don’t know. Like, it used to really annoy me, because I’ve been sick of them essentially reusing the same concept since generation III, but I’ve kinda moved past that now, not because I’ve come to think it’s any less dumb, more because I can’t be bothered getting annoyed about it anymore. Clearly they’re going to keep doing it, so maybe it’s a more productive use of my time trying to figure out why on earth it’s so bloody important to them that every generation have a small cute rodent or lagomorph with electrical powers, and try to look at them in isolation with a view to what is neat about each of them. I liked that they tried to do something different with Emolga, I suppose, by going with a flying squirrel. That was somewhat redemptive. I think they must do it, more than anything else, because they want someone to “carry the torch,” as it were, to say “no matter how much things change, this is still Pokémon.” And this is hardly the only or best way they have of doing that, but clearly it matters to them a great deal.
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:”“Burst evolutions” is really cringy and awful. Please go into the future and tell me that’s not happening.
Well, seeing as you wrote this a couple of weeks ago and I am only now getting around to it (it’s been a hectic month), I can now report to you, from the future, that it is not happening. Yet.
It’s because in Japanese, “Twister” is “Tatsumaki”. “Tatsu” roughly translates to “Dragon”, so Twister being a Dragon-type move is a pun.
Re: this.
Long time reader of the blog, I went back and reread some of your black and white reviews and noticed something. In your Genesect review, you showed the picture of a lot of robotic pokemon and said in the picture that all of them, bar Magnezone, are done better than Genesect. Which leads me to what I wanted to ask, are you not a fan of Magnezone? If so, why is that? Is it purely from a design standpoint, or is it something mechanical, or just personal hatred that I’m not getting?
You know, I honestly don’t remember what exactly was going through my mind when I wrote that particular caption. It was some years ago, after all. I do prefer Magneton’s design to Magnezone’s by quite a lot, not even so much because Magnezone is awful, but because Magneton is sort of fine without it. Magnemite evolving to Magneton makes sense and is kind of neat; they’re magnets, they attract each other, so they evolve by moving together and coordinating. And then… they turn into a flying saucer? Why? I mean, it’s not even a horrible idea, and Magneton was already associated with cosmic phenomena, albeit loosely, but… why?
Also I was a great deal snarkier back then.
Why do you think Hurricane’s a Flying attack but Twister a Dragon attack?
I suppose probably because Twister is in some sense a “magical” attack, in a similar way to Fairy Wind, while Hurricane is notionally about wind created purely by the force of one’s wings. Why does that matter? I suspect there’s probably not a satisfying answer.
Update: this.
War has been a concept alluded to several times in the pokemon games, but has never outright happened. What would you think of a pokemon game in which the whole premise was that a war has started to break out, and your job was to stop it? War in the pokemon world sounds like an interesting concept, and using pokemon as tools of destruction could eventually be shown to be an unspeakable sin.
Well, we do have Conquest, don’t we? That’s not really what you’re asking, but I think that would be Game Freak’s answer, that they don’t want that kind of theme in the core series; Pokémon’s preferred tone is a good deal more optimistic than that, and in fact even in Conquest war is pretty seriously declawed, from what I’ve seen of it. Which is the problem, of course; Pokémon’s been around so long that you have people like me who’ve grown up with it, and wish it could have grown up bit more with us, and think that something exploring themes like that would be really interesting, but then you also have Game Freak, for whom Pokémon is (I think) a vision of what they wish our world could be like. Evil exists, but it can always be overcome; people get hurt, but they can always be healed.
Continue reading “thephilosophicalsheep asks:”I miss douchebag rivals like blue and silver. Why dont they make more characters like that? Do you think they should?
Hmm. Well, it sort of depends what you mean by “douchebag rivals.”
I think rival characters should say something interesting about what it means to be a Pokémon trainer, and sometimes characters with major negative qualities can be good ways to do that. “Nice” rivals like Bianca can do the same thing in different ways, though. Blue was a douchebag because he was supposed to illustrate what a good trainer is not; Silver was a douchebag because he was supposed to illustrate how being a trainer changes you. The closest thing we’ve had to that since Silver is Hugh, who isn’t really a douchebag but does have his troubling anger issues, but he’s sort of doing something different because the point of him is to reframe the Team Plasma conflict with a new perspective. So I suppose I think it’s a matter of whether you can do something clever with it, and what kind of message you can use the character to create.
Pokémaniacal 