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:

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:

Would you say that in the Pokemon world, rather than Pokemon being named after human words, Pokemon names are onomatopoeia derived from Pokemon-speak, and the human words that sound similar come from those Pokemon names?

Yeeeeeeessss?

By which I mean that it makes sense and it seems more likely than not that something like this is going on, but at the same time I’m concerned I’ve never thought through the implications of that possibility in sufficient detail. If you see what I mean. Because it’s a nice way of making sense of what we actually see – that is, a world where all the animals neatly and politely know how to say their own names, but nothing else. And on a certain level it makes a lot of intuitive sense. When you have a very basic writing system, you write the word for ‘horse’ by drawing a picture of a horse, and maybe later on the “horse” symbol becomes the symbol for “h” once you start wanting to write things that can’t easily be represented pictographically. When you’re just grappling with the rudiments of language, well, what do you call the animal that makes the sound “pi-ka-chu”? A “pi-ka-chu-animal,” obviously. And maybe then from there you start to take words for other things from those names for your animals, like, what do you call this pointy stick that you made for hunting? Well, you name it after the pointy bird that hunts things, obviously. Consider also the fact that the Latin alphabet, in the Pokémon world, is explicitly supposed to have been borrowed from the Unown, and it makes perfect sense that elements of spoken language might have been taken over in the same way.

Continue reading →

Anonymous asks:

What would happen if you threw a pokemon at a pokeball?

…why would you…? How…? What?

I mean… I guess the same thing as would happen normally. Right? Unless you have to, like… arm the Pokéball first somehow, like it doesn’t work unless you hit the button before you throw it. I don’t know. But… why?

And if you answer “for science” then so help me I will throw you at a Pokéball!

Anonymous asks:

I dunno if this has been asked, but I wondered if you think there are any parallels between a Pokemon journey and a religious pilgrimage?

Well, I suppose you do travel to a number of specific sites in order to become a better person… I don’t know if I think it’s a particularly useful metaphor for the way modern Pokémon journeys are portrayed in the games and anime, because it tends to be seen as more a “coming of age” thing than a “spiritual enlightenment” thing, so actually a better analogy might be the classic American road trip… which would make a damn good live action Pokémon movie, I think. We could, perhaps, speculate that the modern Pokémon journey is based on some traditional activity with much greater spiritual significance – replace the gyms with monasteries, for instance (and some gyms may not have changed much since then, like Fuchsia and Ecruteak) – but that would be pure speculation.

Anonymous asks:

Do you think there are any similarities between the creations of Pokémon like Claydol and Golett, and Pokémon like Porygon? To me the former always seem to have been created by, I dunno, psychic Pokémagic and the latter via science/technology… but then Golett’s Pokédex entry states it was created by “ancient science” and, come to think of it, does magic even exist in the Pokémon world? And what about Castform? Do you think creating a Pokémon is a long-standing tradition in the Pokémon world?

Mmm, but what is technology and what is magic? If the forces we call ‘magic’ work according to rules that are observable and knowable, then magic can be approached scientifically, and one’s knowledge of how to use it is a form of technology, in exactly the same way as our knowledge of how to extract electrical energy from the wind and tides is “technology.” If ghosts, spirits, psychic powers and souls are real things in the Pokémon world, and can have tangible effects on the physical universe, then you can observe them, formulate scientific theories about them, and create technology that interacts with them. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” says Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum, or to put it another way, ‘magic’ is what we call technology we don’t understand, and I suspect the writers behind Pokémon would incline to a similar idea if you were to press them. “Ancient science” here perhaps means that the people who created Golett knew how to construct vessels that could contain a soul after death and allow it to interact more easily with the physical world, and to me that’s a sort of technology – just one that’s wholly beyond the Pokémon world’s modern civilisations. When they talk about creating Pokémon, they tend to see it as something new, experimental, something they’re just playing with in its earliest stages, but maybe some of those experiments were inspired by ancient stories, and pushed forward by scientists who had exactly this kind of opinion about ‘magic.’

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of the comment going around the internet about James actually being the best Trainer in the anime, because he actually asks and/or invites his Pokémon to join him? What do you think that says about his character?

Well, I don’t know about best necessarily, but he definitely has a lot going for him! We don’t actually see how a lot of his Pokémon join him, but off the top of my head, Yamask, Mime Jr., Cacnea and Inkay all come along because he shows them kindness (and Yamask is particularly interesting because it shows that James retains this trait even during the Unova series, when he and Jessie are portrayed in a much more sinister manner than at other times). I probably see this somewhat differently to a lot of people because I think Pokémon usually choose their trainers, to an extent – the battle is a test, of sorts; ultimately Pokémon are captured when they feel they’ve found a trainer who will make them stronger. I think the fact that James doesn’t do things this way speaks to his very unassertive personality – next to the domineering Jessie and Meowth he sometimes seems outright wimpy, but he also ends up being the closest thing their group has to a voice of reason sometimes, because he’s not so concerned with imposing his will on others. Winning a Pokémon’s respect by defeating it in battle, as most trainers tend to do, probably seems needlessly confrontational to him. This kind of approach sets a different tone for how he interacts with his Pokémon, because they’re not necessarily joining him to grow stronger by fighting for him; they’re joining him for more of a mutual protection/benefit arrangement. The result is probably a degree of equality that we don’t normally see between trainers and Pokémon – though of course James is still nominally in charge.

Anonymous asks:

What happens if a pokeball is destroyed having a pokemon inside?

I imagine the Pokémon would simply pop out. There is one episode, Pokémon Food Fight, in which Ash breaks his Snorlax’s Pokéball by dropping it on a rock – the ball isn’t destroyed, but it does stop working. Snorlax immediately comes out. In general Pokémon seem to maintain some degree of awareness while inside a Pokéball and can emerge on their own if they particularly want to, so I suspect that, whatever weird energy state they’re in while inside a ball, it’s not particularly stable, and has to be maintained by the ball’s mechanisms to keep them from just immediately returning to physical form.