Category: Reader Questions

Anonymous asks:

Do you consider bronzong to step on claydol’s toes?

Hmm.  Interesting question.  

They’re definitely very similar aesthetically, as artefact Pokémon with mystical powers that move by levitating and are pretty much inscrutable.  I think there are some important differences, though, particularly Claydol being vaguely humanoid, and Bronzong having a very particular cultural inspiration (Japanese Iron Age ritual bells that were used, among other things, to pray for rain – this is why Bronzong can remember Rain Dance and Sunny Day via Heart Scales).  They’re both very closely tied up with the ancient civilisations of the Pokémon world, but in different ways; Bronzong was actually worshipped for its specific powers, whereas it’s sort of unclear whether Claydol were ever actually alive in ancient times, or just came to life somehow afterwards (perhaps even relatively recently).  You can do very different things with them, I think.

Anonymous asks:

Couldn’t gamefreak have simply taken volbeat/ilumise and plusle/minun and mashed them into a single pair of designs? They would have then had a pair of firefly pokemon with a relatively exclusive type combination, unique breeding mechanics, and a whole teamwork thing going on, backed up by the plus/minus thing. This would have been objectively interesting, and also not have ripped off pikachu.

And make ‘em Bug/Electric, you mean?  Hmm.  Yeah, I think quite like that, actually.  The cliché that “opposites attract” would tie Volbeat and Illumise’s romance theme together with their new Electricity powers quite nicely.  I think the problem is that Game Freak considered ripping off Pikachu to be a virtue of Plusle and Minun rather than a fault.  Which… y’know, is not really a position I can understand, but clearly it’s important to them since they keep bloody doing it.

Anonymous asks:

Do you have any Pokémon fan theories you are particularly fond of? If so, what are some of them? Would love to hear what theories a Pokémaniac such as yourself find intriguing! 😀

Other than my own? 😉 Heh.  No, that’s a joke; mine are a load of nonsense (just browse for a while, especially the anime commentaries).  But yeah, I don’t know… I don’t really go out of my way to look for these, and my reaction to a lot of them is “well, sure, if you like?”  I’m quite fond of the whole Venonat/Butterfree mix-up thing, purely because I think it’s one of the few bits of wild internet speculation that might actually be true.  Beyond that, though, mostly I just really enjoy the thought processes that go into some of the really dark interpretations of little details of the game, like the story that got built up around Blue’s Raticate dying on the S.S. Anne.  It’s going way further than I think you can take the creators’ intentions, but it’s interesting enough in its own right to be a lot of fun.

vikingboybilly asks:

So there’s debate over what makes a pokémon a dragon type, or a fairy type, or even a normal type, but I’m wondering what GameFreak thinks constitutes a bug-type. At first it seems obvious, but there are anomalous outliers like anorith being bug while kabuto, krabby and corphish are not. Shuckle is a worm; I don’t think of a worm as being a bug. Skorupi loses it’s bug typing for Dark, and if a bug has a secondary typing and grows wings when it evolves, it won’t be a FLYING type.

Well, Shuckle’s not a worm; it’s labelled the “mould Pokémon” so I think it’s probably meant to be more like a slime mould, but that’s hardly a “bug” either.  I’m not sure that I have a good answer for this one.  I think probably their ideas of what “Bug-type” means are more aesthetic than biological.  Crustaceans aren’t Bug-types because they more clearly “belong” in Water.  Anorith not being Water is really odd, because the way Armaldo is portrayed, as one of the first living things to move onto land, seems like it should give a good reason for Anorith to change from Rock/Water to Rock/Bug when it evolves; I think they may have wanted to avoid Rock/Water for the second set of fossil Pokémon, though, since Kabuto and Omanyte had both been Rock/Water.  So I suppose what it seems to be, to me, is “arthropods that don’t obviously belong somewhere else,” with one or two odd extras like Shuckle, who certainly doesn’t seem to belong elsewhere either… Grass, maybe?

Anonymous asks:

Hey you pokéstupid why do you think Australia and NZ are stupid countries? Your usa not america isn’t the center of the world, its the center of xenofobics like u

You misunderstand, gentle reader.  I’m from New Zealand (I thought my use of the phrase “back home in New Zealand” would render all confusion impossible, but clearly not…).  I was calling the United States ridiculous and backward (tongue firmly in cheek, of course… well, mostly).

Anonymous asks:

How do you think a Cherubi would feel if you fed it a cherry?

Unclear.  On the one hand it seems likely that the resemblance between the two is mostly superficial, but on the other hand, do they know that?  I would think they’d be pretty creeped out… but then, there are parts of the world where people eat monkeys.  Possibly a Cherubi would just feel insulted that we even thought it was similar enough to a cherry to be worth the comparison.

vikingboybilly asks:

So… ghost types. It’s pretty well implied that ghost pokémon are spirits of the deceased, but you can breed them… and hatch ghost pokémon from eggs. Does something have to die somewhere for the egg to be laid? Or do they just… procreate new spirits, who may eventually incarnate a living being? (you can breed yamask, btw) Shedinja is handled well; it’s a shed skin with sentience. Froslass, though… fact: Gengar is white on the original red/blue box art.

…is it?  I mean, very clearly they have an affinity for death, the dead, and places of spiritual power, but if anything I’d say that they are implied to be very much not what everyone thinks they are.  

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Anonymous asks:

On your entry about Goodra you got a comment from someone who (rather crudely) claimed that male Goodra were worthless. I first looked at this comment and thought it was rather stupid… but it isn’t. A female doesn’t need a male of the same species to reproduce. In Goodra’s case any Dragon egg group Pokemon will work. Surely this puts the species with a larger percentage of females at a massive advantage? And for that matter how do you think male species like Tauros can exist at all?

Just so that no one is in any danger of taking it seriously, I will quote here the comment that we are currently referring to:
“Goodra is a girl. She cannot be male.It’s nice to see you agree. There’s a place called 4chan who is in denial about it. They constantly say that Goodra can be male, but it’s obvious she can’t. As for me, I’ll keep reminding them that she is indeed of the female gender only. I hate male Goodra to the point where I spam on 4chan about how horrible it is. I hate it with a fiery passion that nobody could ever match. As for the female, It’s just that in reverse. I love her with an angelic passion that nobody could ever match. Nobody likes male ones. They’re treated like pigs because that’s really what they are. Whatever you do, never refer to Goodra with anything other than female pronouns. OP, you focused very heavily on using femnouns and I salute you for it.”

…quite.

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Anonymous asks:

Would you like to see a Mega Vileplume?

Yes and no… I mean, Vileplume is my favourite Pokémon so, like, if you want to give her cool stuff, go right ahead, but I don’t know if the pile of extra stats associated with mega evolution necessarily solves the problems that she has.  With the exception of Slowbro, Sableye and Aggron, most top-tier mega Pokémon are offensive powerhouses, and that’s not really what Vileplume is trying to do anyway.  I think her real problem is that her hidden ability (Effect Spore) is just bloody useless, and her regular ability (Chlorophyll) is amazing but completely mismatched to her role.  You could use mega evolution to cheat in a replacement ability, I suppose, but honestly I would much rather just add a second regular ability; most Pokémon have two, and giving Vileplume something a) really strong and b) different from what other Grass-type supporters have would, I think, just about do it.