Anonymous asks:

Maybe the “different franchises” thing was an exaggeration, but you can’t deny that overall Pokemon have gotten much less natural. Besides oddballs like Mr. Mime or Voltorb, first gen Pokemon looked like real creatures and now they’re like action figures.

I believe you’ll find I can deny anything that I think is untrue.  We agree the style is different, but I would never have thought to describe it in terms of being more or less naturalistic; that varies from one design to another but I don’t think there’s an overall trend across generations.  I honestly have no idea what “like action figures” even means in this context.

Anonymous asks:

How do you feel about how much more cartoon Pokemon designs have gotten lately? Most of them don’t even look like they’re from the same franchise as the original 151.

I think maybe some of your phrasing here needs dissecting – like, calling one of two groups “more cartoon” is an extremely vague way of comparing them when both of them objectively are cartoons.  I would understand “more cartoonish” to mean something along the lines of… probably more zany, more “out there,” less naturalistic, and I honestly don’t think that would be a remotely fair assessment.  Voltorb and Electrode, I think, are some of the most cartoonish Pokémon of any generation.  But maybe we’re understanding the words differently.

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Thoughts on the Pokémon Go Teams

I’m probably supposed to have to opinions on Pokémon Go by now, so we should talk about that.  Obviously if you know my writing then you know that I tend to be more interested in things like story and characterisation and world-building than in strategy and mathematics and the inner workings of the game, because frankly there are loads of other people on the internet who are just much better equipped than me to deal with the hard-core mechanical stuff.  And Pokémon Go, although I am having a lot of fun playing it, doesn’t give me a whole lot to pick apart, in the way that I like to pick apart episodes of the anime or whatever.  But I would clearly be in dereliction of my solemn duty as an Internet Pokémon Guru if I did not produce some form of rambling commentary on the bits of this game that have managed to catch my interest – namely, the three teams and their competing philosophies.

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