Category: Reader Questions

Anonymous asks:

It’s been implied in certain Pokedex entries that only a select few Pokemon are actually capable of understanding human speech. If this is true, how is it that all Pokemon are able to understand the commands for each their attacks right after being captured, with no training whatsoever?

Difficult to explain, but I suspect they understand the intent behind words, as expressed through a combination of tone and body language, to a degree that is unusual for humans.  They may not know, right off the bat, exactly what words mean, but they can tell instinctively whether the tone of a command is aggressive, or cautious, or desperate, and they can tell the difference between being told to use a regular technique and being told to do the most powerful, dramatic attack in their arsenal.  The first couple of battles will often be rocky; that’s part of what characters in the anime mean when they talk about having to learn to work in unison with your Pokémon, and it’s part of why empathy is so often stressed as a vital quality for a Pokémon trainer.  You don’t see this in the games, of course, but, well, would you like to?  It would just be a pain.

viridian kingof kanto asks:

In XY the Gym Leaders and Elite Four all held titles of nobility which increased (the Champion as Grand Duchess and GLs as Marques). But you yourself are also able to climb the social ladder and gain titles. What do you think that meansforthesociety?

Well… to be perfectly honest I think it means that the noble titles are really not very important in modern Kalos.  They’re an anachronistic remnant of what I think may once have been a Pokémon-training aristocracy that ruled Kalos in a period when not everyone could train and battle with Pokémon, probably before the invention of mass-produced Pokéballs.  At one point, membership in the nobility made it possible for people to become trainers.  Today, anyone can be a trainer, and being good at it can get you into the nobility – but since it’s no longer exclusive, the nobility can’t really act as a cohesive group with distinct goals and values anymore.  Its political power has been supplanted by modern democracies, and its central position in the institution of Pokémon training has been supplanted by the Pokémon League.  All that’s left is ceremonial.

Anonymous asks:

The more recent Pokemon games imply that Gym Leaders adjust their strength and difficulty based on the challenger so that its not a complete stomp in either direction what are your thoughts on this?

That it’s really the only way the Gym system can make any damn sense.

Think about it; not all trainers start their journeys in Pallet Town (or New Bark Town, or wherever), and not all of them will follow the same routes as we do through their home regions – not least because our routes are often determined by unusual temporary obstacles; if that Sudowudo hadn’t been standing in that exact spot, it would have made perfect sense for a trainer starting in Violet City to earn their second badge in Ecruteak City.  Gym Leaders are supposed to be educators as much as they are obstacles; they want trainers to learn stuff, not get curb stomped three weeks into their journeys, give up, and go home.

Anonymous asks:

Do you think there’s any relationship between Pokémon like the Magnemite line, the Beldum line, and the Klink line? If so, what might that be?

The ‘mechanical’ Pokémon, that is?  Honestly I think it’s impossible to say, although Magearna might shed some light on all of that, once we learn more about her.  Voltorb are supposed to have appeared suddenly around the time of the invention of mass-produced Pokéballs, and Professor Juniper discovers that Klink appeared in Chargestone Cave about a hundred years ago, so I wouldn’t rule out their creation having something to do with human influence.  I doubt they were deliberately made by humans, because they mostly seem to be thought of as mysterious Pokémon and no one seems to know exactly where they came from, but they might be the result of human activity in much the same way as Grimer (i.e. the waste products of human technology, stimulated by “X-rays from the moon”).

Anonymous asks:

Even though I believe on your argument on the whole Beartic x Dragonite question, I don’t really think that the thing about levels is possible. Principaly because the levels don’t seem to make a very big influence on the anime. One example is one of the starting episodes of the Unova series where Pikachu loses to Trip’s Snivy. (His name’s Trip right? Right) The Snivy was recently catched and I can’t really believe Pikachu would be something lower than 50 and it surely didn’t just “reset”

I agree with you in principle, but that’s a bad example.  The whole context of that battle is that Pikachu’s just had his powers drained by Zekrom.  He is operating at vastly diminished capacity compared to practically every other time we ever see him fight, and the games offer us no guidelines on how to simulate that.

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of Detective Pikachu for 3ds?

…I am so confused.

It’s actually kinda neat in a lot of ways, though.  Like, if I have this straight, the deal with the kid is that he and the Pikachu can understand each other for reasons that are currently mysterious, and as a result they can work as a team to operate just as effectively among humans and among Pokémon.  That puts them in a very unique position that could be exploited in all kinds of ways by a shrewd and discreet investigator.  And that is a really interesting premise; it’s just a shame this is a fairly low-budget game and won’t have the space or the ambition to explore it fully.

…and yes, I have signed the change.org petition to get Nintendo of America to hire Danny de Vito as the English language voice actor for Detective Pikachu.

Update: No Danny de Vito ='(

Anonymous asks:

I really dislike the anime, but principally because MANY of the battles are completely inaccurate. This gets to my frustration point principally on the Unova series. I don’t remember exactly, But i THINK it was on chapter 752 that happened the biggest bullshit I’ve ever seen. (The start of the Junior cup) First of all, a Serperior beats a Darmanitan with a single solar beam (This isn’t the worst part) but THEN Iris’s dragonite just survives two ice beams from a Beartic! What do you think?

Okay, so, I think “inaccurate” is an interesting choice of words here, because it implies that battles in the anime are supposed to be a representation of something else, and that we can judge them by the closeness of that representation.  Presumably you think they’re supposed to be representations of battles in the games, which I don’t believe is now the case or ever has been; I think the games and anime both represent, in different ways, the same abstract fantasy.  Really, it makes just as much sense to say that the games are “inaccurate” for failing to allow for the level of tactical variety or the influence of individual personality and relationships that we see in the anime.  Furthermore if this is the “biggest bullshit you’ve ever seen” then clearly you haven’t watched Solid as a Solrock; personally I expect bullshit of a much higher calibre from the Pokémon anime.  But let’s run some of these numbers.

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Anonymous asks:

Reaction to Magiana?

Certainly very curious… presumably she’s the vanguard of generation VII, and of course that’s exciting, but the really interesting part is that this is a legendary Pokémon who was explicitly built by humans – and not thousands of years ago by mysterious forgotten magic like Golurk, nor genetically engineered from an existing template like Mewtwo, but in the 16th century with mechanics and clockwork, with the same kind of principles that modern engineering still functions on.  I think there’s a lot Magearna might tell us about the history of Pokémon training, and how it changed at the dawn of the modern world.  What really catches my eye is that she seems to have Pokéball emblems built into her design, and given that Pokéballs as we know them are supposed to be quite recent inventions, that makes me wonder what the connection is.  Did the symbol mean something different five hundred years ago, or was the design of the first Pokéballs based on Magearna’s body?

Anonymous asks:

What do you make of the weight of various Pokemon. For example, why does something like Beautifly weigh as much as a young child, while giants such as Primal Groudon weigh only about a ton. (Primal Groudon seems especially weird in that its almost fifty percent larger than its normal form, but only weighs about one hundred pounds more. Primal Kyogre is even more bizarre.). This seems to be a trend among Pokemon, with small species being super dense, while big ones are ultra light, like Wailord.

This has always bothered me, but upon looking into it, I think many of them actually hold up quite well.  In some cases part of the difficulty is that it’s not always clear what a Pokémon’s listed “height” actually means – like, if Beautifly’s body is one metre long from head to toe (does… does Beautifly have toes…? Bah; whatever) then I could easily see her weighing 28kg; if 1m is, say, from the tips of her antennae to the ‘tails’ of her wings, or maybe even a 1m wingspan, then it becomes a lot harder to swallow.  In general I’m mostly fine with the weights of small Pokémon.  

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