GrayGryphon asks:

Do you think there should have been a Fairy-type that got Illusion as an ability? Not necessarily an existing one, just as a concept in general.

Hrm. It makes sense, don’t get me wrong – fairies go well with illusion and deception – but I think the Illusion ability is something that it’s better to keep as Zoroark’s ‘thing,’ both for Zoroark’s sake (because, to be honest, it would probably not be difficult to come up with a Pokémon who gets more out of Illusion than Zoroark does) and to avoid the chaos that would be brought about by having both of them on the same team. That’s not to say we can’t try to think of something that draws on a similar idea of deception, though… fairies from different cultures and different stories can have control over a wide variety of elemental forces, so… maybe a Fairy-type who can have several different secondary types, which the opponent can’t immediately identify. It can be (say) Fairy/Fire, Fairy/Electric, Fairy/Water or Fairy/Grass, chosen at birth, and its appearance is the same for all four (maybe including elements from all four types), which means that the opponent has to fire off one or two “test” attacks to figure out what its weaknesses and resistances are. Undecided on whether to have moves that are unique to each form or just give all four a wide range of attacks. Could go either way there.

Klefki

And Game Freak said “let there be Klefki,” and old school Pokémon fans around the world cried out “the $#!t is this?” and “why is there a f@#%ing keyring Pokémon?” and “OMG Pokemans ruined 5evah.” And Game Freak said “YOLO,” for they felt that it was good.

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So I got mugged this afternoon

…by a bunch of, like, 14-year-olds, no less, and in broad daylight. Thankfully I lost only my glasses (of which I have spares) and was rescued by passers-by who drove me home. Jaw aches a bit from being punched repeatedly, but it’s been a couple of hours and I’m pretty sure I’m not seriously hurt. Could have gone a lot worse, all things considered. Nonetheless, next entry will be delayed as I plan to spend the next day or two doing absolutely nothing.

I submitted a thing to another thing

The premise of this blog is taking quotes from pop culture and tweaking them slightly so that they apply to characters from Homer’s Iliad (recently expanded to anything ‘classical’). It amuses me. You should totally follow it. Y’know, if you’re a classicist. The following is something that I actually wrote months ago and had hanging around uselessly until I discovered “OMG there is a Tumblr blog that is literally all about doing this.”

incorrectclassics:

H’okay, so, here’s the Aegean. S’chilling. ”Dang, that is a sweet sea,” you might say. WRONG! All right; ruling out the Hittites invading, a huge barbarian horde becoming crashed into us, the gods leaving, and Thera exploding, we’re definitely all going to stab each other. H’okay. So basically we’ve got Troy, Crete, Lydia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Thrace, the Amazons and us with demigods. We’ve got about twenty-six hundred more than anybody else… whatever. H’anyway. One day we decides those Trojan sons of a bitches are going down, so we launch a thousand ships at Troy. While they’re on their way, Troy is like “shit, shit, who the fuck brought Helen here?” “Oh well, Hector will save us!” Then Helen is like “shit, Paris, that’s my husband; he’s coming! Fire our shit!” ”But I’m tired.” ”Well… have a nap. THEN FIRE YOUR ARROWS!” Meanwhile, Italy is over there like “mamma mia, WTF?” Lydia, Ethiopia and the Amazons send their guys, so now we’ve got heroes charging everywhere, passing each other. Achilles is like “PATROCLUS, NOOOOOOOOO!” Then Hector’s like “well, I’m dead. Better get on with it.” So now Greece is like “fuck, we’re dumbasses,” Philoctetes is like “wait, what the hell did I miss?” Italy is still like “mamma mia, WTF?” China is laughing at us, and some huge barbarian horde is like “well, fuck that.” So. Now we’ve got the fall of Troy. Everyone’s dead, except Aeneas, and he’s like “mamma mia, WTF?” And they’ll be in charge one day. Fucking Romans. But, assuming we don’t all stab each other, us Ithacans just have to work out Ithaca drifting away from the rest of Greece. To go hang with Scheria. Cyprus can come too.
– like, Homer or someone

Which is a reference to this, if you don’t recognise it.

Hawlucha

Right; I’m going to leave Carbink for now and do her with Diancie at the end, by which time I’ll hopefully be clearer on how they work, so that leaves only one Pokémon in the Coastal Kalos subregion: Hawlucha, the… lucha libre Pokémon… which is another one stricken from the list of phrases I never thought I would live to say. Game Freak are responsible for a disconcerting number of those. Funnily enough, though, Hawlucha’s been making more and more sense the more time I spend on this entry, and may even be one of my favourites of this generation now, which I didn’t really expect. Let’s have a look.

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Helioptile and Heliolisk

Now that I think about it, it’s kind of strange that there aren’t really many Electric Pokémon based on real-world methods of electricity generation; for the most part they just conjure up electrical energy through – one presumes – a similar kind of biochemical process to that used by the electric eel, only turned up to eleven. Well, either that or magic. Let’s be honest; for at least some of them it’s probably magic.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Helioptile.

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Skrelp and Dragalge

I’ll be honest here; I’m not wild about these things. My first impression of Skrelp during my X playthrough was ‘so, it’s a diseased Horsea?’ and I’ve not really moved past that in any major way (the fact that Dragalge is equally, at first glance, ‘a diseased Kingdra’ didn’t exactly help). Nothing about them really offends me in any sense, but they’re not particularly ones for the ‘favourite’ pile either. Still, may as well see what we can turn up. Here we go.

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Anonymous asks:

Did you know that Chandelure’s Hidden Ability has been changed from Shadow Tag to Infiltrator? This opens up the possibility of other Pokémon to have one (or more) of their Abilities to be changed (at least, it sets a precedent)! Any specific Pokémon in mind whose Ability/(ies) you’d like to be changed?

Well, it’s worth pointing out that there has never been a Chandelure with Shadow Tag – Dream World Litwick were never released in generation V, and to my knowledge no AI opponent ever used one either, not even Ingo and Emmet, so they’re changing something that only ever existed in unused coding and our own fevered power fantasies anyway. I doubt this is an indication that they’re willing to start mucking around with existing abilities that are actually used in practice, and I wouldn’t call it a precedent for that. (EDIT: However, the fact that Scolipede’s was changed from Quick Feet to Speed Boost absolutely is. Derp. Doesn’t really change the rest of this answer anyway, though.) For the most part, abilities I’d want to see changed are the ones that are just insultingly bad, like Run Away, Keen Eye and Illuminate, and personally I would fix those by improving the ability itself (see e.g. Lightningrod and Storm Drain), not by changing which Pokémon received it. I can’t think of any off the top of my head that I would actually want to redistribute, though there are probably at least a couple out there.