Anonymous asks:

Happy new year! This question is random, but you do well at coming up with amusing responses to odd questions. Also I love your blog. Anyway: Do you have a new years resolution and what is it?

(Yes this is how far behind I am on questions; shut up)

I tend not to actually declare new year’s resolutions, because if you openly make a new year’s resolution and then fail to keep it, you’ll be cursed by Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways, beginnings and endings, and the new year.  I know “god of doorways” doesn’t sound menacing, but trust me, you do not want to be on that guy’s bad side.  But anyway… things that I generally want to do this year BUT ARE NOT FORMAL RESOLUTIONS, DO YOU HEAR ME JANUS include having my $#!t together more with regards to cooking for myself and keeping my apartment tidy, and also finding the time somewhere to go to Scotland and visit Jim the Editor because we haven’t seen each other (barring Skype) in over a year now.

Anime Time: Episode 65

Showdown at the Po-Ké Corral

That's it. That's the episode.
That’s it. That’s the episode.

Now safely back in Pallet Town, Ash has to start preparing for the Pokémon League tournament – and in order to do that, he has to visit Professor Oak to find out when and where the tournament actually takes place (evidently, the answer is: in exactly two months, at exactly the same place as every year – the Indigo Plateau).  It apparently never occurred to him before now to look this stuff up.  When he arrives at the lab with Misty and Brock, Oak is apparently more excited to see Togepi than to see him, but nonetheless welcomes the gang into his sitting room, where they find out that – as always – Gary is two steps ahead of Ash.  They are almost immediately at each other’s throats, but Professor Oak protests that it would be a shame for there to be a feud between Pallet Town’s two “top trainers” – to the indignant disbelief of both.  Ash and Gary snipe each other for a while as the Professor examines their Pokédexes, and then it’s time for a tour of his facilities.

Continue reading “Anime Time: Episode 65” →

pixel3r asks:

Wishful Thinking: The anime is getting rid of Ash, and is going to start the next generation’s anime with a totally new protagonist. And YOU have the opportunity to design them~ What sort of character do you design?

Hard to say… a lot of Ash’s existing personality traits are actually kind of useful ones for a main character to have, like it’s actually good for your main character in a fantasy world to be a little bit clueless, because the audience can learn about the world as they learn, and Ash’s enthusiasm for battling and capturing Pokémon are important for getting people to buy into the main premises of the franchise.  So it’s probably good to keep those things… to an extent, anyway.  But what might be different?  Well, it would be nice to have the protagonist be a girl, for a change… and we could contrast Ash, who is if anything overly friendly with Pokémon he’s just met, with a character who has a bit more difficulty bonding with Pokémon, and has an initially more standoffish relationship with them, more like Gary… add a very curious, analytical bent, sort of like Red from Origins, to play into the Pokédex quest and the theme of exploration… something like that, I think.

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of the different depictions of Pokémon between the main anime and Origins? For example, the way some moves are portrayed, Pokémon cries, or even the way Pokémon are recalled into their Poké Balls.

I don’t know; the only thing I really remember noticing was that Charmander sounds like a cat being strangled for some reason.  I suppose abandoning the “Pokémon say their names” convention is meant as an effort to make them less cartoony, more like real animals, and I have no problem with this.  To be honest, the rest is just swirly glowy things; depictions of those change a bit between seasons of the anime as well.