vikingboybilly asks:

I think the problem with hail is that it gives benefits ONLY to ice types, whereas the other weathers splash around benefits to electric, grass, ground and steel types. Any ideas to give other types advantages in hail?

It doesn’t even benefit Ice-types, really, so much as not disadvantage them… that is, unless they have Blizzard, Ice Body or Snow Cloak.  I sort of think it would make sense to add something analogous to Sandstorm’s bonus for Rock-types and say that Hail gives Ice-types +50% physical defence.  It’s hard to think of anything that makes thematic sense with Hail as a benefit for types other than Ice, though, which is probably why Game Freak has never done it.  You might be able to come up with something that makes sense for Water-types, I suppose, but they already have bonuses from rain, so screw them.  You could, however, make the penalties more severe for some types in particular – defence penalties for Rock and Steel, for instance, on the grounds that rapid cooling makes materials more brittle, which would add more to Hail’s ability to wear opponents down.  Or perhaps Hail could do more damage to Pokémon that are weak to Ice attacks, which gives a bit more variance to how teams with different compositions are affected by it.  At the moment the only real way to build a Hail team is to put several Ice-types on it, but if there are some Pokémon who are weakened significantly more than most by Hail, there will be others who are in a position to take advantage of that.

Anonymous asks:

Murkrow and Honchkrow vs. Misdreavous and Mismagius, purely on a design/concept level.

Well, I guess I would say that I think Misdreavus and Mismagius seem to hold together in a more coherent fashion.  With Murkrow and Honchkrow there seems to be this weird disconnect, where Murkrow is all about witchcraft, superstition and misfortune, but then Honchkrow is… like, a mob boss for some reason?  I can kind of see links there, don’t get me wrong – the Mafia are Italian, and Italians are a superstitious lot; Honchkrow apparently gets called “the Summoner of Night” for his role in leading groups of Murkrow, which sounds a lot more like a name you’d give to the master of a coven of witches than to a Mafia Don; Murkrow steals and hoards shiny things, so an association with criminality isn’t out of the question.  But there just isn’t anything there, for me, that ties it all together.  Honchkrow is just… odd, as an evolution from Murkrow.  On the other hand, that same mix of different influences kind of makes them more interesting Pokémon to me than Misdreavus and Mismagius, somehow.  There’s stuff about Murkrow and Honchkrow that demands explanation in a way that isn’t the case for Misdreavus and Mismagius; you can imagine weird stuff about their social structures, and their existence kind of suggests some odd overlap between organised crime and superstition or witchcraft in the Pokémon world, which is the sort of curious place that makes a good starting point for telling a story.  So… “hmmmm…” is what it comes down to, more or less.

Anime Time: Episode 38.5?

Holiday Hi-Jynx

Wait.

The next episode is something that makes thematic sense for me to do as a Christmas thing?  That never happens!

Strictly speaking, Holiday Hi-Jynx isn’t the next episode (you can tell because Charmander hasn’t evolved and Togepi hasn’t joined the team yet); it was probably meant to happen around the same time as Pikachu’s Goodbye but got derailed by the same mess surrounding the Porygon episode that caused Snow Way Out to be rescheduled.  But it’s usually been aired a couple of slots after It’s Mr. Mime Time, while Ash is theoretically supposed to be back in Pallet Town, and IT’S CHRISTMAS, DAMNIT so let’s talk about the Jynx episode, and then ramble about Christmas traditions and Santa for a while.

We begin with Team Rocket kidnapping Santa Claus as he comes down their chimney.  Because they are Team Rocket.

Continue reading “Anime Time: Episode 38.5?” →

Anonymous asks:

How does Dwebble “melt holes in hard rocks with a liquid secreted from its mouth” without any acid based attacks?

…huh.

Y’know, that…

…huh.

Okay, well, I suppose my stance has to be that, If I Were In Charge, Dwebble would get Acid because it makes sense and there’s no compelling game balance reason for him not to, but given that he doesn’t… Upon closer inspection, the Pokédex never actually says “acid” or “acidic,” it just mentions a secretion from Dwebble’s mouth – so maybe it’s not an acidic solution at all, but a special enzyme in Dwebble’s saliva, designed to break down certain kinds of rock?  It’s slow-acting, ineffective against all other materials, and therefore utterly useless in combat, but important for Dwebble’s way of life.  I think that makes sense.

Anonymous asks:

What would you say are the Pokémon that best exemplify the five Contest categories?

Mmmm… tricky…

Well, beauty has to be Milotic, right?  ‘cause originally Milotic’s very evolution was tied to the beauty stat, and no other Pokémon has that kind of connection.

I reckon cleverness and toughness are probably Alakazam and Machamp respectively, since in the original games they sort of form an opposed pair of brain and brawn.

Coolness is hard because it’s something that you know when you see it but is hard to define; if you look at the moves associated with it, they tend to be either flashy, dynamic and powerful or quick and accurate, so there are kind of two aesthetics blended in there.  I think I can probably appeal to popular authority, though, and say without fear of contradiction that the coolest Pokémon of all time is Charizard.

Cuteness is downright impossible because there are so many Pokémon you quite justifiably could pick.  Also I happen to think Dunsparce is the cutest Pokémon ever but I suspect this is a minority view on my part.  I might have picked Pikachu for this because of his universal popularity, but Cosplay Pikachu firmly establishes him as being linked with all five categories.  The best I think I can do is narrow it down to two – Eevee or Togepi – because I think the concept of ‘cuteness’ implies the potential for growth, and those are both Pokémon for whom that’s a really important design element.