Category: Reader Questions

Cell Block Chacha asks:

So between your experience in New Zealand and what you’ve got so far here in America, which place would you say is more LGBT friendly? Just asking out of curiosity as a gay American myself.

Eh.  I don’t think I’m really the best person to ask.  Like, I come from New Zealand’s biggest city, so I grew up in an environment that was quite socially progressive even by our standards, and now I live in Ohio, which is… probably not the very best America has to offer on that front?  But on the other hand, most of the people I actually have anything to do with are academics like me, and academics pretty much everywhere are overwhelmingly liberal and have no patience for discrimination (my department has… at the moment, I think like seven or eight openly gay or bi graduate students, including me?).  I don’t really get out much, and since I don’t have a boyfriend there’s really no reason a stranger would know I’m gay unless I choose to tell them, so it just doesn’t come up.  That’s… that’s probably not a very good answer.  In strictly legal terms New Zealand is certainly very progressive as far as that goes, more so than most parts of the United States, but I don’t actually know how we’d compare to somewhere like California or Massachusetts.

Anonymous asks:

If you had the power to mind control Gamefreak employees while they’re brainstorming Pokemon ideas, what would you have them come up with?

Okay, let’s be clear on one thing here; if I had the power to mind-control Game Freak employees at any time at all, I would use it to make them wire all of their company’s money into my US bank account, then high-tail it to Acapulco and never be seen again. Just so that’s clear.

But aside from that, I would probably start by temporarily blocking out all memory of Pikachu and Pikachu’s popularity, because that is the only way I’m ever going to get them to stop making more goddamn cookie-cutter electric rodents.  Then I would compel them to spend hours on end staring at Mediaeval European bestiaries.  Then again, it’s possible they do that already.  It would explain Murkrow startlingly well.

Anonymous asks:

Just how big is the Pokemon world, anyway? How long would it take to cross a region on foot?

Well if we assume one space in the game is about 1m by 1m which is probably pretty close then Viridian City is not much bigger than 1600 square metres which is, like, smaller than my university campus, so, like, you could probably walk a whole region in less than a day.  Ash is just f&%^ing lazy

Anonymous asks:

How do you get the inspiration for the Nuzlocke character’s personalities?

I had a procedure, actually.  I have ceased to follow it, because it got restrictive and I pulled better ideas out of the aether, but I used to have one.  What I used to do was every time I caught a Pokémon I would use a random number generator to roll a D&D-style alignment for them (Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic + Good/Neutral/Evil) and that combined with their nature was their personality.  Like, Ruby is Bold and Lawful Evil, which hopefully makes sense, and Spruce is Rash and Chaotic Good.  Melissa was Jolly and I had no idea what to do with her until I rolled Lawful Neutral for her and thought “well, okay, obviously she needs to be in fanatical service to a terrifying amoral entity.”  It made sense at the time.  Luna was Impish and Chaotic Evil and come on that writes itself.  Now though I mostly just do whatever works in the context of the story, because there’s enough already there that it’s a better source of inspiration than a random number generator.  Usually I pester Jim the Editor about it and we talk about it and eventually I come up with something that’s at right angles to whatever either of us originally had in mind.