X Nuzlocke, episode 7: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Reflection Cave

Ruby: So… this is what that Lucario meant by “through the looking-glass,” I suppose. Load of cryptic nonsense… And there’s no other way to Shalour City, Nidorino?
Martial: None that I know of. But there may be a benefit to travelling through these caves. Somewhere within lies a Moon Stone that will allow me to evolve into a Nidoking. I was questing in search of it when I was attacked outside. [to Spruce] I would better be able to serve you in a greater form. However, you must not delay your own tasks on my account. It is your decision whether to search for the stone, my saviour.
Spruce: Sure, we can look for it! Right, Ruby?
Ruby: [raised eyebrow] He’s your minion, Spruce. What do you think? Is making him more powerful worth the investment of your time?
Spruce: Um… y-yes?
Ruby: Is that an answer, or another question?
Spruce: Uh… I… yes. Yes! We’d be a lot stronger with a Nidoking on the team, even if it’s only temporary! Let’s do it!
Ruby: As good a reason as any. Lead the way.
Boreas: If the asking be not injurious, what was thy former quest, good sir? To what end didst thou seek after thy lunar gem?
Martial: That is irrelevant now. If and when I am able to repay my life-debt, I will return to my former duty. Until then, it must be as though my life were forfeit.
Spruce: But maybe if you tell us, we can help-
Martial: I will not speak of it! If I had been killed, my cause would surely have been abandoned and lost. As things are, it is merely delayed. For that alone, my debt is almost beyond reckoning. I cannot and will not allow you to do more for me until it is repaid.
Ruby: [muttering] Hmph. Doesn’t know how lucky he is. What I wouldn’t give for minions like that…
Spruce: What was that, Ruby?
Ruby: Nothing, nothing. Let’s get moving, shall we?
Fisher: Truly, this place is a wonder… these marvellous crystal panes… like the great mirrors of ice in which Burrito the Lightbringer is said to have seen, reflected, the true soul of the Lazorgator, and the path for love to conquer hate…
Ruby: Don’t stare at those too long.
Fisher: My lady?
Ruby: There’s powerful magic here. Old magic. You shouldn’t play with what you don’t understand.
Spruce: But you do that all the time.
Ruby: …well, yeah, but…
Boreas: Thy care for thy fellows is admirable, milady, yet they are but mirrors.
Ruby: Hey, who said I care!? Fine, gaze into whatever you like for as long as you like, just don’t come crying to me when your soul gets sucked into a gemstone or something…

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Inksword asks:

I always thought the rock typing was a side-effect from the fossil reviving process.Since fossilization is the replacement of stuff with rock, and you’re specifically reviving from FOSSILS not DNA (except, I guess, for aerodactly) the typing changed

Mostly works for the games (except for, as you mention, Aerodactyl). Doesn’t work once you bring the anime into it, because there are episodes where Ash encounters surviving populations of supposedly extinct Pokémon (like the Kabuto in the Orange Islands), and even one where he actually travels through time and sees Tirtouga and Carracosta in their natural prehistoric habitat. It’s pretty clear from instances like these that the fossil Pokémon aren’t substantially altered from their original biology.

Inksword asks:

I thought they made the switch from clefairy because they wanted a more gender neutral pokemon and clefairy was too pink and girly? Or is that just a rumor that’s never had evidence?

Dunno. It would kind of make sense? I can’t find anything reputable online that discusses it in any detail. Most people who talk about the decision are pretty clearly extrapolating from Bulbapedia’s rather bare-bones account.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

Is Blaziken the closest living relative of Tyrantrum?

Almost certainly not; let’s talk about why.

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Anonymous asks:

If you had the power to make any other Pokemon besides Pikachu the mascot, who would it be? (I would choose Poliwhirl)

You know, I’m honestly not sure that I would. Pikachu being the mascot, like a lot of other stuff from Pokémon’s early development, kind of happened by accident. Pokémon didn’t really have a mascot at first; Pikachu gained the spot because of the popularity of the anime, for which he was largely responsible. But Pikachu being Ash’s starter and the most prominent Pokémon character in the anime was a last-minute change; he was originally supposed to be a Clefairy, and it’s not entirely clear why they made the switch. Ultimately, he’s the mascot because people love him, and people love him because, objectively, he is adorable as f$%&. Much as I like to complain about Pikachu spawning a line of irritating knock-offs in subsequent generations, it’s hard to deny that he earned his popularity. So yeah. I’d keep Pikachu.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

In regards to the nidorina and nidoqueen thing and the cubone thing, I’m going to connect them into a theory that makes sense. Cubone and Marowak were meant to be unable to breed, and gamefreak accidentally somehow put the unbreedable trait on nidorina and nidoqueen instead, and they never corrected their mistake by making nidoqueens able to lay eggs and marowaks unable to.

A lovely idea, marred only by the lack of any evidence whatsoever…

The story of Red and Blue establishes that a Marowak can be a “mother,” regardless of whatever else is going on with the Cubone skulls, so why would they have intended to make Cubone and Marowak unbreedable? Moreover, it makes perfect sense that, if they were going to make a mistake with the breeding rules, it would happen to a Pokémon whose relationship to gender is unusual – there’s no need to bring Cubone and Marowak into the picture to explain the slip-up with Nidorina and Nidoqueen, particularly as the two Pokémon have nothing to do with each other.

Anonymous asks:

Gamefreak have tried before to design insanely powerful pokemon with a shockingly bad ability (Regigigas, Slaking, Archeops) and they’ve generally failed or at least turned out pretty shakily. Do you think it would be possible to ever do this and make a consistently usable pokemon?

Hrrm. Tricky.

I feel like it has to be possible, because we have items that give their users severe disadvantages, and those get used all the time. If you imagine for a moment a Pokémon with really high attack and special attack scores, maxing out somewhere in the 550-600 region, and decent stats elsewhere, whose ability locks it into using only one attack until it switches… people would almost certainly use that, right? Because people use Choice Band and Choice Specs, and that’s basically what I’ve just described, in ability form. Obviously this particular example is impossible because if a Pokémon like that existed, people would stack choice items on top of its existing advantages for no extra cost, and all hell would break loose, but the point is that some disadvantages are clearly worth it. The trouble is that I’m pretty sure the competitive multiplayer environment is not really on Game Freak’s minds when they playtest these things, and that’s the only way you’re ever going to draw the line between broken-because-good and broken-because-bad, both of which will be serious possibilities whenever you create a Pokémon like this. I mean, Archeops is fine in single-player; I used him in my first playthrough of Black and he was fantastic. Slaking has the potential to be ridiculous in the right hands because the AI doesn’t know how to exploit his weakness. So the designers are kind of firing shots in the dark here, I think. That makes it unlikely that they’re ever going to get it exactly right, but sooner or later they’re bound to get something that falls on the overpowered rather than the underpowered side if they keep trying.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

Why are mamoswine and relicanth not fossils? Also, Relicanth should evolve into a Dunkleosteuss pokemon. Cool idea, no?

Well, the whole point of Relicanth is being based on something that’s actually not extinct but just looks like it should be. Making Relicanth a fossil would sort of defeat the purpose, in a way. I mean, you could have Relicanth available as both a fossil and a wild Pokémon, which I think would be a cool way of emphasising its unusual status, but from Game Freak’s perspective, why would you do that? And would most players actually like that, or would they feel cheated by getting a ‘fossil’ Pokémon that they could just catch normally? Dunkleosteus… eh. Sure? It is again kind of defeating the purpose of Relicanth, but it’s not like evolutionary history in the Pokémon world makes any damn sense anyway.

As for Mamoswine… well, one of the ideas I have about fossil Pokémon is that they’re all Rock-types because Rock-type skeletons are unusually robust, and so representation in the fossil record is overwhelmingly skewed towards Rock Pokémon. Fossils of prehistoric Pokémon of other types – including Mamoswine – are rare enough that we just never come across them in the games.

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.

Rivals, part 6: Colress

Okay, I realise that we’re pushing it by including Colress in this series; it’s easy to come up with reasons to lump in N with the list of ‘rival’ characters, even though he behaves very differently to the rest of them, but Colress is very clearly not the same thing. However, I don’t care and I want to talk about Colress, because shut up.

Nice reasoned argument there.

Thank you.

So, Colress. Crazy mad scientist character. I was underwhelmed by him, to be honest. I mean, what does he even do?

I actually liked him! I enjoyed the fact that he was working pretty much at right angles to what literally everyone else in the story was trying to do.

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