Moves, Movepools and Flavour

Pokémon are, almost by definition, creatures with incredible abilities, often ones which exceed the boundaries of what we believe to be possible.  Normally I like to make a fuss of the aspects of the Pokémon world that have nothing to do with the powers, like history and ethics and society and culture and all the rest, but let’s face it, I’m at least partly in it for the thrill of having a flying murder-dragon with four different kinds of exploding death lasers.  What you can do and what you can’t is fundamentally a part of who you are, and what Pokémon can and can’t do is expressed in the games through their stats, their abilities, and in perhaps the greatest variety through their moves.  I like to say that Pokémon “should be good at the things they’re good at” – that is, they should possess the skills we would expect them to, based on their designs, and those skills should in turn contribute to the way we see them and use them.  Mechanics and flavour should work together – well, at least that’s what I think.  Let’s talk about how that works (or fails to).

As of the release of X and Y, there are 609 moves in the Pokémon games: 609 effects which are available in various combinations to different species.  Some are basic, and others are complicated.  Some are effective in a wide variety of situations, others require a great deal of forethought to be useful at all (with varying degrees of payoff).  Some are powerful, others are weak.  Some are available to many Pokémon, or to almost all of them, others to only one or two.  All of them say something about the Pokémon capable of using them – and that includes the ones that would never see any use competitively, or even in a normal playthrough!  Let’s take as our first example the unanimously agreed worst move of all: Splash, which has no effect whatsoever, and is useful only in the most contrived of situations (say, if your opponent is trying to stall you down to Struggle, and Splash’s 40 PP allow you to sit on your butt for longer without running out of moves, or something).  For all that, only a handful of Pokémon are actually able to learn this non-technique; indeed in Red and Blue it was unique to Magikarp, hailed in-universe as the weakest Pokémon of all – the only one so pathetic it had a move that allowed it to flop around doing absolutely nothing.  Since then the move has been bestowed (either as a level-up move or a hereditary one) upon Poliwag, Horsea, Hoppip, Cleffa, Delibird, Azurill, Wailmer, Spoink, Feebas, Wynaut, Luvdisc, Buneary, Finneon, Mantyke and Clauncher.  What is the common thread with these Pokémon?  Like Magikarp, some of them are portrayed as being particularly helpless, like Poliwag, who can barely walk on land, Hoppip, at the mercy of the breeze, Wynaut, whose evolved form is unable to take spontaneous action, or Spoink, whose heart actually stops if he doesn’t continually keep bouncing around uselessly.  Most of them are on the cute end of the spectrum as well, adding to the impression of vulnerability.  The enduring message is that these are Pokémon who require particular nurturing and attention in order to grow and succeed (although they won’t necessarily be helpless forever – Gyarados certainly proves that, as does Kingdra).  One of these things is not like the others, though – what’s Clauncher doing on this list?  To me, the fact that Clauncher starts with Splash conveys a certain weakness that would not otherwise be immediately apparent from his design – and it’s not entirely inappropriate, since he isn’t exactly a physically imposing Pokémon.  I would also suggest a link with the fact that Clauncher is incapable of learning many of Clawitzer’s most powerful attacks, like Dark Pulse and Aura Sphere; more than most Pokémon, he has a lot of growing to do, and is especially vulnerable in his infancy.

X and Y added a lot of moves with very specific uses; in particular, there are a number of support moves which seem like they would only be useful in a triple battle, and only then with a fair amount of planning.  Take Rototiller, for instance, which raises the attack and special attack of all Grass Pokémon in battle.  To begin with, only two Grass Pokémon – Paras and Cacnea – are capable of learning this move (and even them by chain-breeding via Buneary), so for most Pokémon it can only be useful in a double battle.  Even then, a Rototiller boost is functionally equivalent to the boost provided by Growth… which, y’know, most Grass Pokémon can learn… so really in order to get the proper bang for your buck you want to set things up in a triple battle so that two Grass Pokémon at once are getting the bonus.  As contrived a situation as it takes to make Rototiller useful (and believe me, as a card-carrying Grass Pokémon Master, my next project is to contrive the heck out of it for a Battle Maison triples team), as a move that expands what we know about the Pokémon who learn it, it’s solid gold, because it conveys the ecological function that the Pokémon who possess it – Sandshrew, Dugtrio, Onix, Rhyhorn, Linoone, Bibarel, Lopunny, Watchog, Excadrill, Dwebble and Diggersby – have in aerating soil and helping plants grow.  In the case of Dugtrio and Excadrill, we knew that already, but for the others it’s neat new information (although one does wonder how important a desert Pokémon like Sandshrew would be in that capacity).  For a Pokémon like Rhyhorn, who doesn’t really dig tunnels habitually, it even prompts me to imagine early human farmers hitching up their first rudimentary ploughs to domesticated Rhyhorn.  Another bizarre little trick is Vivillon’s signature move, Powder, a priority attack that causes a Pokémon to explode and take damage if it tries to use a Fire attack during that turn.  There are numerous disadvantages here – 1) you have to predict an incoming Fire attack, 2) it’s unlikely to work more than once in a battle, especially given that Vivillon’s defences are so bad it doesn’t really take a super-effective attack to bring her down, and 3) it requires you to actually use Vivillon in the first place.  On the other hand, I feel like all that is totally worth it to see an attack backfire in such a spectacular fashion, and it does establish Vivillon as a clever, tricky Pokémon who will take no $#!t from anyone.  Probably my single favourite ‘WTF’ attack in X and Y is Ion Deluge, another priority technique which turns all Normal attacks used that turn into Electric attacks.  Again, it seems like this could only be useful in double or triple battles, because although most of the Pokémon that learn it do have some kind of ability that lets them absorb Electric attacks, you still have to predict an incoming Normal attack, and even then the benefit you get is not huge.  Even in doubles or triples, I have difficulty imagining a situation (let alone thinking of a reliable way to set one up) where it would not be equally useful just to… y’know… use an Electric attack, something all Pokémon with Ion Deluge can do.  I’m not sure what kind of ‘characterisation’ Ion Deluge is supposed to create either, which is a shame.

Other times, we get Pokémon whose techniques conspicuously fail to express what they’re supposedly all about.  My favourite example is probably Gigalith, whose ‘thing’ is his ability to store, magnify and direct solar energy using the crystals on his body, creating devastating blast attacks that can destroy mountains.  Great, except that Gigalith needs a TM to learn Solar Beam, and has a very discouraging special attack stat to back it up.  Drowzee and Hypno, famously, still require human intervention to learn Dream Eater after all these years, despite the fact that eating dreams is literally how they survive.  In Red and Blue this almost made sense because the Dream Eater TM could only be used by Hypno, Gengar and Mew anyway, so it was sort of an unlockable signature move like Softboiled (which no Pokémon learned on its own, but could be taught to Chansey with TM 41).  Now, though, there are literally hundreds of Pokémon, including some who can’t even induce sleep like Ambipom, Lickilicky and Aurorus, who are just as good at eating dreams as the dream-eater Pokémon themselves.  Just as strange is Sceptile, introduced in the last generation before moves started to be assigned “physical” or “special” individually rather than by type.  By now, Game Freak had gotten the hang of the way their own system worked.  Sceptile seems like a physical Pokémon but, like poor Feraligatr, all his best flavour-appropriate attacks – Leaf Blade, Dragon Claw and Crunch – were special, so they made Sceptile a special attacker.  Things became very weird when Diamond and Pearl rolled around, though; all Sceptile’s favourite moves were suddenly keyed to the wrong stat.  As a result, he now favours Dragon Pulse, Focus Blast and Leaf Storm, and is actually quite bad at using his own signature move.  Would it not have made more sense if, when Sceptile’s entire movepool flipped from special to physical, he had flipped with it?  A happier example is Lickitung, whose key characteristic is his enormous tongue.  The obvious problem with Lickitung, in the mad old days of Red and Blue, was that he couldn’t actually learn Lick.  The interesting problem was that although he got Lick in Gold and Silver, it was much longer before he gained effective attacks that could be visualised as using his tongue.  Slam was his mainstay from the beginning, but Slam is terrible.  Wrap, which he got in Gold and Silver, is scarcely worth mentioning.  Knock Off in Ruby and Sapphire was an improvement, but it was really Diamond and Pearl that gave Lickitung and Lickilicky properly useful attacks that fit the way we’re supposed to imagine them fighting: Power Whip and Wring Out, which relatively few other Pokémon learn.  They’re not the best attacks around, but both can argue for a place on a serious moveset, and they provide a good example of updating an old Pokémon in an appropriate and interesting way.

Then there are attacks that everything learns, or almost everything, at any rate: Hyper Beam, the ultimate expression of a fully-evolved Pokémon’s might, Protect, the standard “no” technique, and Hidden Power, whose universal availability hints at a kind of soul energy that can be drawn upon by all living things.  There are also things which are… harder to explain or justify.  All Pokémon can learn Toxic.  What?  I’ve actually been asked to explain this before, and settled on the idea that since Toxic is supposed to be a ninja technique – that is, a human technique – it probably uses principles that are accessible to humans, and to all Pokémon.  Pokémon who’ve been taught Toxic can recognise, collect, store, and use poisonous substances that they might not actually be able to secrete on their own.  A bit unfortunate, perhaps, for the poor Poison-types, who have to live down the fact that their most powerful ability is available to nearly every Pokémon in existence, but at least X and Y threw them a bone by giving Toxic perfect accuracy when used by a Poison Pokémon.  It gets worse, though; most Pokémon can create illusionary duplicates of themselves, with varying degrees of substance – almost all can learn Double Team and Substitute.  Weather manipulation, too, is shockingly common; Sunny Day and Rain Dance are normally denied only to Pokémon who would specifically be disadvantaged by them in some way.  I have to imagine that, in all but a few cases, these techniques are more like prayers (to Groudon or Kyogre?) than actual exercises of a Pokémon’s own powers – think of the connotations that the phrase “rain dance” has in English, and the fact that Rain Dance’s Japanese name, Amagoi, refers to a prayer for rain – while the rarer and seemingly effortless Drought and Drizzle abilities imply a real connection with the weather on some level.

Other moves available by TM are not quite so universal, but in general they are still far more often seen than most Pokémon techniques.  Many of these are go-to attacks for competitive movesets – staples like Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, and Surf.  Being so widely available means that these moves don’t tell us all that much about the specific Pokémon who learn them, but their prominence in strategy means that they contribute something to how the types themselves are portrayed.  When we think of the Ground type, for instance, we don’t just think of Ground-type Pokémon – we think of the ubiquitous Earthquake, one of the best physical attacks in the game.  When we think of Fire, we think of Flamethrower, but also of Fire Blast, which, being more accurate than Thunder or Blizzard and often a better choice than Flamethrower, is much more likely to come to mind than its Ice or Electric equivalents, so that Fire becomes a type associated with overwhelming power (Overheat only adds to the effect – Grass has an equivalent attack, Leaf Storm, but very few Pokémon can learn it, while Overheat is widely available).  The closest thing Psychic has to a go-to physical attack isn’t a physical attack at all, but a special attack which hits the target’s physical defence, Psyshock, thus reinforcing the typical view that Psychic types do not rely on their bodily strength.  Conversely, Rock has no common special attack at all.  The popularity of U-Turn and Volt Switch, accessible to many Pokémon through TMs, links Bug and Electric with speed, cleverness and changeability.  Sometimes I am concerned that the steady proliferation of techniques with every generation will eventually erode the differences between the types completely; we’re moving steadily closer to a situation where every type has both a physical and a special attack with a power rating of 80-90 and 100% accuracy, which would rather be throwing the baby out with the bathwater as far as establishing balance.  On the other hand, if only a few Pokémon get to flout the stereotypes of their elements – like Lucario and Beartic do, like Gigalith could have – then what we’re really getting is opportunities for specific Pokémon to be awesome in specific ways, which is the primary virtue that should be kept in mind here.

Finally, since we’re talking about TMs, we inevitably come to my pet hate, a move that not everything can learn, by any stretch of the imagination, but available to a truly bizarre selection of Pokémon who seem as though they should have no business learning it: Aerial Ace.  I offer first the usual disclaimer: I know Aerial Ace in Japanese is called “Turning Swallow Cut” and is named after an old katana technique.  Fine.  I have no problem with this move being available to Pokémon who can’t fly.  However.  The move’s description implies that it involves great speed and agility, which is why it never misses.  Also, it’s a Flying-type move and the Pokémon who learn it on their own are mostly birds, continuing that theme (the exceptions being Heracross, who can fly, Honedge, who is a living sword, and Gogoat, who… um… yeah, I got nothing).  And indeed, many of the Pokémon who learn it out of TM 40, as well as favouring cutting or slashing attacks, possess either great speed or flight… but then there’s Slaking.  Bouffalant.  Tyranitar.  Shelgon.  Ferrothorn.  Mr. Mime.  Crustle.  Aggron.  Regigigas, of all things.

And, of course, my favourite: Slowbro, but not Slowking.

Mechanically, very little separates Slowbro and Slowking.  Slowking’s special defence is higher, and he can learn Nasty Plot, Swagger, Power Gem, Quash, and Dragon Tail.  Slowbro’s defence is higher, and he can learn (in addition to a few moves that Slowking could get as a Slowpoke by delaying his evolution) Aerial Ace.  That’s the one move Slowbro has that Slowking can’t mimic.  Think about this in the context of everything else I’ve talked about in this over-long entry, and it all adds up to one thing.

Someone over there has a very strange sense of humour.

Fairy Pokémon

So.  How ‘bout that new element, huh?

When Nintendo announced that there would be an eighteenth type in Generation VI, I was one of the Pokémon fans who were neither excited and joyful about it nor annoyed and upset (there are, at the last count, seventeen of us in the world, one of whom is quite old and could die any minute).  Before X and Y were announced people used to ask me sometimes what new type I would add if I could, expecting that of course I would add one or more if I had the chance, and naturally I was difficult with them because I enjoy being difficult, and I was minimalist because I enjoy being minimalist, and I would say “well, actually, there’s one or two that could stand to be taken out…” and if pressed I would babble a bit about having a ‘Holy’ type or some such, although my heart wasn’t exactly in it.  It’s not that I disliked the idea; I just had a different view of how to do the things that a new type would do.  A new type means rebalancing the type chart – well, you can fiddle with the relationships of the existing types without adding new ones (though people might feel cheated by that).  A new type means new design opportunities – but really, what gaps were there in the existing set?  A new type means a new class of Pokémon, linking species that were previously disparate – is that good or bad?  In short, having a Fairy-type does all sorts of things that I probably would have chosen to do without it, but they’re done now, and Dragon and Steel no longer rule the universe, and there are probably lots of different new Pokémon that will happen now who wouldn’t have happened before, so let’s see what we can come up with to say about these critters.

Game Freak have rebalanced the type chart before, of course; they added Dark and Steel, way back when, because they wanted to break the stranglehold of the Psychic-types over the world of Red and Blue (apologies if this next part bores you; some of us old f%$#wits, of course, remember what Psychic-types were like in Red and Blue, but not everyone was there, so shut up and let them listen).  With their attacks resisted only by other Psychic Pokémon, vulnerable only to the pathetic Leech Life, Pin Missile and Twineedle, immune to Ghost attacks (i.e. Lick – Night Shade worked, but dealt static damage anyway) because of a mistake in the type chart, and thereby dominating over the poor Ghost/Poison Pokémon who were somehow supposed to counter them, Psychic was hands-down the best element in the game.  The addition of Pokémon who actually resisted their attacks changed all of that, and Psychic-types are now better known for supporting roles than for the devastating special attacker positions they tended to occupy in the first generation.  The fourth and fifth generations had a somewhat different situation going on: there were two types ruling the roost the way Psychic Pokémon once had – Dragon, because they had some of the most powerful attacks that could be relied upon (notably Outrage and Draco Meteor) and could only be resisted by one other element, and Steel, because they were that element (and also because they resisted literally two thirds of the type chart).  Thus we have Fairy Pokémon.  Fairy Pokémon, as I’m sure you’re all aware by now, are completely immune to Dragon attacks.  This spells disaster for Outrage, because it locks the user into using the same move again for two or three turns, it spells disaster for Dragons with Choice items, which have a similar effect and remain among the most popular ways of getting the biggest bang for your buck, and even Dragons who use neither are none too happy.  They now find themselves in a similar position to that Psychic Pokémon did in Gold and Silver, though admittedly not quite as serious: their near-perfect neutral coverage is now blemished, forcing them to confront the fact that, actually, their attacks hit for super-effective damage against very little (only other Dragon types, in fact).  Lesser Dragon-types like Druddigon and Altaria are going to be feeling that one for a while, but Pokémon like Dragonite and Hydreigon still enjoy the advantage of… y’know, being Dragonite and Hydreigon, with the attendant versatility, power and all-around magnificence, so they can come through just about anything smelling of roses, but now that the most terrifying thing about them can be wished away with the wave of a magic wand, their lives are going to get a lot more… interesting.

An aside on how the other types feel about all this, purely because it’s the only chance I’ll have to talk about that (and throughout all this, it’s also good to remember that the availability of Dazzling Gleam via TM adds a completely new trick to the repertoires of a lot of Pokémon who can now stand up to Dragon-types).  Steel-types didn’t come through the changes entirely unscathed – they lost two of their resistances, to Dark and Ghost, which is important because there were so few types that did even neutral damage to Steel before, much less super-effective, that many Pokémon found they were utterly incapable even of learning anything Steel-types didn’t resist, through no fault of their own.  Steel also got a huge bonus, though – they’re one of the two elements that can hit hard against Fairy Pokémon (the other being Poison, which desperately needed the boost), a benefit which also comes with another bloody resistance, so honestly I think they probably win as much as they lose here.  I just want to point out, at this juncture, that no other type in the game has more than six resistances (the runner up, surprisingly, is Fire; Poison has five, and none of the others exceeds four).  Steel has ten, plus Poison immunity.  Just saying.  Meanwhile, Fighting loses out by being one of the elements resisted by Fairy-types, but I’m pretty sure they can take it; a lot of things resist Fighting attacks, but almost as many are weak against them.  For some reason, Game Freak also felt that Bug needed to suffer in the same way, which seems kind of unfair, given how awful an element Bug was already, but maybe they thought that Grass was feeling lonely being the only type resisted by seven others.  What I seem to be getting at is that I don’t think the type chart is now ‘fixed’ by any stretch of the imagination and that more aggressive changes would not have hurt, but this isn’t really what I’m supposed to be talking about.  Back to Fairies.

Most of the ways Fairy Pokémon interact with the other types make some sort of thematic sense.  The overpowering advantage against Dragon-types is controversial, but, well, what do dragons do in fairytales?  “Get slain,” seems to be the pattern.  Rarely does one find a terrible fire-breathing damsel who must be slain in order to rescue the pure and virtuous dragon, though I’m sure it would make a good story.  The posture of abject surrender which they adopt when facing Steel-types, likewise, makes sense – it is well-attested in European folklore that creatures of the Fey are repelled by cold iron (often any metal will do, but cold iron – iron forged by pure bludgeoning force, without the application of heat – seems to get the most consistent results).  Fire, similarly, is universally known for its ability to repel magical threats, while Fighting-types stand little chance against Fairies for much the same reason as they are defeated by Ghost- and Psychic-types; all the martial skill in the world just doesn’t help much against magic.  The remainder are trickier.  Fairies beat Dark-types, I suspect, by virtue of being associated with goodness and purity, where Dark Pokémon are connected with treachery and outright evil.  Weakness to Poison was obviously necessary for balance reasons but thematically, as far as I can tell, it’s probably something about purity and corruption, perhaps mixed with the idea that Fairies, being otherworldly and having their origins in a place without sickness or disease, are particularly vulnerable to these earthly difficulties.  I’m afraid on Bug they’ve lost me, which is doubly infuriating because resistance to Bug is probably the one thing about the Fairy-type that makes me wonder, from a purely mechanical perspective, just what on earth they were thinking.  Maybe because traditional fairies often have the ability to control insects, as mounts and the like…?  I’m not sure I buy it.  Honestly, the reverse, much more kindly to the poor Bug-types, could have been easily justified: fairies react to bugs with a girlish shriek in the tradition of Misty.  While I’m on the subject of unfairness, I also think this would have been a wonderful opportunity to give the downtrodden Normal-types some love by making them strong against Fairy Pokémon, on the grounds that they are normal, firmly rooted in the real world, and don’t care so much about magic (which I think is the same reason they’re immune to Ghost attacks) – but no; no-one cares about Normal-types.  Anyway, the sense we get here, overall, is that the type relationships of Fairy Pokémon mark them out as being representative of fairytale goodness in general, and all things bright and beautiful – although their relationships with Steel- and Fire-types might hint at a connection to older folklore in which fairies, elves and the like, while enchanting and beautiful, are also dangerous.

Before the Victorian authors (and to a lesser extent Shakespeare, most notably in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) got to them, fairies in European folklore were a curious mix of old Celtic nature gods and Christian ideas about demons.  Even more recent characters like J.M. Barrie’s Tinkerbell, who can be jealous, spiteful and possessive, don’t entirely leave this behind.  They’re not necessarily malevolent, but they come from a place where humans really don’t belong and can easily get lost.  They play tricks, they lie, cheat and steal, they dispense good luck and bad on a whim.  They steal children and raise them as fey, leaving stunted, dumb Changelings in their place.  They’re known to kidnap adults too at times, which can be great until they quite innocently forget that humans need to eat, or just don’t realize that we age.  Terry Pratchett said it best:

“Elves are wonderful.  They provoke wonder.  Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.  Elves are fantastic.  They create fantasies.  Elves are glamorous.  They project glamour.  Elves are enchanting.  They weave enchantment.  Elves are terrific.  They beget terror.  The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.  No one ever said elves are nice.  Elves are bad.”

The kinds of Pokémon who have been awarded the Fairy-type so far seem to bear out a more standard ‘fairytale’ interpretation – I mean, really, how much more saccharine can you get than a literal sentient ball of candyfloss?  Like Puck or Tinkerbell, there are some mischievous ones in the bunch, like the famously unpredictable Clefairy or the cheeky Whimsicott, but mixed in with sweetness-and-light Togekiss, and loyal, pure Gardevoir.  Perhaps the only one who hints at the really dark side of the fey is Mawile, based on a treacherous Japanese monster.  In fairness, though, when we start getting further into that style of fairy, there’d be a lot of overlap with Dark in terms of what the type means… which brings me to the next question: does the Fairy type blaze such new ground that we needed it to accommodate new designs?

Jim the Editor is adamant that there are no Pokémon in X and Y or anywhere else that actually need a new type in order to express what they can do, and that there is no reason any hypothetical Fairy Pokémon you care to come up with would not be equally well served by some combination of Normal, Psychic, Dark and possibly Grass.  Ultimately there aren’t that many to account for because, of course, most of the Fairy-types that exist now are Pokémon who already had types or type combinations that served them well enough.  All we’re left to deal with are Flabébé and co. (Grass or Grass/Psychic), Aromatisse, Slurpuff and their associated spawn (and honestly, Normal has so much in it already that stuffing in perfume and candyfloss as well would hardly hurt it), Dedenne (who is just Pikachu again for the fifth time; face it), Carbink and Diancie, whatever their relationship is (pure Rock would work, actually, since Power Gem has established that gems and crystals fall under Rock, but Rock/Psychic would surely be fine too), Klefki (Steel/Psychic), Xerneas (why not Psychic, really?), and Sylveon, who was the first hint anyone got that there would be a new type – but be honest, if not for the fact that a Normal-type Eevee evolution would have been weird, is there anything about Sylveon that would have said to you “no; can’t be a Normal Pokémon”?  If all those other Pokémon had been part of the pre-release hype and Sylveon had been kept hidden, would you really have thought to yourself “gotta be a new type there”?  Perhaps the existence of the Fairy-type will stimulate the creation of more folklore-based Pokémon, who are often among my favourites.  On the other, perhaps it will only give us more pink fuzzballs.  I am uncertain.

The other question I’m left with is why certain other Pokémon are not Fairy-types, because I’ve always found that an equally useful way of thinking about what a type means and where its unity comes from.  Why isn’t Chansey a Fairy-type (aside from the fact that no-one wants Blissey running around with Dragon immunity)?  What do Wigglytuff and Azumarill have that she doesn’t?  Why should Gallade have remained Psychic/Fighting rather than switching to Fairy/Fighting?  Doesn’t his ‘chivalry’ thing fit right in with the fairytale theme, and isn’t it arguably more important than “I have MIND SWORDS”?  Personally, I also would have loved to see Snorunt and Glalie become Ice/Fairy, because they’re straight out of Japanese folklore just like Mawile, and because I’m fond of malevolent fairies.  Jim the Editor wants Tangela to be Grass/Fairy, because of its deceptive and tricky nature, Milotic to be Water/Fairy, because of her aura of serenity (and what’s more ‘fairytale’ than a magical lake with a beautiful fairy guardian?), and Rapidash to be Fire/Fairy, because… y’know, unicorn (although admittedly Rapidash lacks the purity-and-magic ideas associated with the unicorns of folklore and is more about fire and horsiness).  This might be a good place to return to Dragon-types, because Dragon is an element that is similarly difficult to pin down, for similar reasons – both are subsets of “Pokémon inspired by folklore,” and both represent a particular kind of creature with representatives of one sort or another in multiple cultures, ensuring that the names evoke a wide range of different ideas in the real world, and as a result, both have lines that are very difficult to draw.  I’m not sure anyone knows what a Dragon-type is anymore, living as we are in a world where Altaria and Dragalge are Dragons while Gyarados and Charizard are not.  The fact that there are Dragon and Fairy breeding groups, which overlap with their namesake types, but not exactly, makes life even more confusing.  Probably the best we can hope for is some vague thematic statement: both are magical creatures (more magical than most Pokémon, that is) with powers that place them above mere mortal concerns, Dragons being generally monstrous in nature, Fairies generally sweet and kind (or at least appearing to be), and superficially more human-like.

Fairy is hardly the only type with blurred edges – I’ve long contended that Ground melts into Normal on one side and Rock on the other, and I think everyone has one or two retypes they want to see happen.  It also isn’t going to create a neat balance between the types, though it’s certainly a valiant effort.  It mostly makes sense, but in some ways is very weird.  I don’t think it really needed to exist, but since ‘fairy’ Pokémon have been a legitimate classification for a long time now, it sort of makes sense, in a way, that we now finally have Fairy-with-a-capital-F Pokémon.  I guess ultimately that puts me right back where I started: it’s not good or bad; it’s just new.  One way or another, the game will never be the same again – which is exactly what we really want out of a new generation, isn’t it?

Would you consider fire type Pokémon to be bioluminescent, or is that classification only suitable for Pokémon equivalents of real world bioluminescent animals like Lanturn or Volbeat/Illumise?

Er… does it matter?

I sort of think the distinction is totally academic; to my knowledge, there are no real-world animals that just persist in a natural state of being on fire, so I’m not sure whether a real-world biologist, presented with a creature like that, would react by calling it ‘bioluminescent’ or by coming up with a new word altogether.  I mean… if I’m being called upon to settle a bet or an argument or something… OED says bioluminescence is “the biochemical emission of light by living organisms,“ and, well… fire is a chemical reaction, all right, so I guess I’d say "yes, they are.”

Hello! Since you enjoyed Twitch plays Pokemon, I’d like to recommend the music from Church of the Helix Choir. They have three different songs–Bloody Sunday, All Terrain Victory, and Praise the Helix Fossil, all great in my opinion… I get chills listening to them sometimes, it’s amazing how they turned a bunch of jokes into something so powerful with just music. Anyway, I hope all has been going well for you!

I’m not really a musical person (understatement of the year, any of my friends will tell you), and I don’t think music really affects me in the way it does most people, emotionally speaking – but yeah, these are pretty neat. I particularly like Bloody Sunday; very solemn, almost haunting.  One could almost use this whole endeavour as a case study in the creation of a religion – and only partially tongue-in-cheek, at that.  Faced with meaninglessness, we create meaning; faced with luck, good or bad, we ascribe it to divine providence… and, of course, faced with the utterly banal, we create art and beauty.  Again… neat.

Team Flare

Team Flare grunts showing off their trademark poses and 'stylish' uniforms.

Just like I had to talk about Iris and Diantha because I’ve done all the other Champions before, I have to talk about Team Flare and Lysandre because I’ve done all the other bad guys before.  If you followed my playthrough journal of X version, you may have picked up that I have some rather strong opinions about Lysandre and his underlings, and the way the games portray them, so I think it makes sense now to take a deeper retrospective look at their involvement in the whole of the plot.  What do Team Flare really want, what makes them tick, and does Lysandre deserve our forgiveness?

Our first encounters with Lysandre are in Lumiose City, first in Professor Sycamore’s lab and then with Diantha in the Café Soleil.  Here we see the face Lysandre presents to the world: utterly dedicated to the preservation of beauty and the betterment of the world.  He speaks admiringly of Professor Sycamore’s brilliance as a scientist and Diantha’s ability as an actress to bring joy to millions, associating them and their careers with his own quest to build a beautiful world.  Even here, though, there are strong hints that he’s up to more than he lets on – on X, he declares that he wishes to “make this world unchanging and eternal so all beauty will last forever.”  In another game, I would not take such a clearly poetic sentiment seriously, but this is Pokémon, and Pokémon is not especially known for its subtlety.  On Y, he is far less circumspect about it: “I would end the world in an instant so that beauty never fades.”  Again, it’s probably meant to sound hyperbolic, but since ending the world is something that people have tried to do before in this series, that probably escaped many players; I played X, of course, but I find myself wondering how anyone could doubt that Lysandre was an enemy after hearing a line like the one he delivers on Y.  Ultimately, what he’s actually trying to do (on both versions) falls somewhere between the two – end the world of human civilisation in order to preserve what remains of the beauty of nature.  In addition to his potentially apocalyptic foreshadowing, I also noted in my entry on Diantha that this scene hints at some degree of superficiality (even sexism?) in Lysandre’s character – he focuses on Diantha’s physical beauty as the thing that makes her a good person and contributes to building a better world, considering that the loss of her own beauty with age would diminish her ability to make the world more beautiful too.  Much as he admires her devotion to making people happy, he downplays her ability to take action towards that goal and looks to her passive qualities – this represents an important flaw in his character that is going to recur later in the story.

 Xerosic, mastermind of the Expansion Suit and chief scientist of Team Flare.

Lysandre’s minions, in their first appearances in the Glittering Cave and outside Geosenge Town, display none of his semblance of nobility.  Their stated aim is to help and advance members of their own organisation, regardless of the cost to others (and to pursue the heights of fashion…).  The idea of “a more beautiful world” never comes up, even in the later dialogue of the five scientists who run the group’s more pedestrian activities while Lysandre is busy: Aliana, Bryony, Celosia, Mable and Xerosic.  It annoys me a little that there are so many of them, because it means that each of the four girls doesn’t get to do much, but they do have distinct personalities, which is nice.  Aliana, who supervises the attack on the Kalos Power Plant to gather electricity to power the Ultimate Weapon, seems to enjoy battling the most, and may be slightly unhinged.  Celosia and Bryony (who are together in both of their appearances – I unashamedly ship these two) are responsible for raiding the Pokéball factory in Laverre City to gain the Pokéballs necessary to catch many powerful Pokémon whose life energy will fuel the weapon; they seem detached, nerdy, and a little philosophical.  Finally, Mable, who goes after one such Pokémon, the Abomasnow in the Frost Cavern… well, frankly, Mable is a callous b!tch.  “Allow me to spell it out for you! It’s so Team Flare – and only Team Flare – can survive!” she declares as she torments the gentle Ice Pokémon.  “After all, why should we care about saving people who aren’t on our side?”  Xerosic’s appearance in the story’s climax in Geosenge Town establishes him as a man utterly without conscience or remorse, willing to activate the Ultimate Weapon and slaughter billions even against Lysandre’s orders (if the player wins Lysandre’s bet about the two buttons in Xerosic’s lab) simply for the joy of what he considers scientific achievement.  He also features, of course, in the little post-Elite Four Looker vignette as Emma’s employer and tutor, a position which he exploits heinously.  The message of his involvement in that story seems to be that even thoroughly evil people are capable of love and affection and that, even though those things cannot and should not absolve Xerosic of his actions as part of Team Flare, they still deserve recognition.  Also appearing in the Looker sequence is Malva of the Elite Four, apparently a member of Team Flare, who makes no secret of the fact that she despises you, but seems to hate Xerosic more for abandoning Team Flare’s grand mission in favour of petty crime.  Her dialogue in Elite Four rematches thereafter suggests that Malva has developed something of a grudging respect for the player’s strength, despite her intense hatred, and believes that the strength to force one’s beliefs upon the world is all that really matters in life.

 Whatever else may be said about them, I love the Team Flare Admins' ridiculous pimp outfits.

Interspersed with your actual encounters with Team Flare, a few more interviews with Lysandre himself take place, one in person with Professor Sycamore and a couple by Holo-Caster.  His speech and ideas remain grandiose throughout, and he encourages us to give thought to how we will use our power, but only when you see him in Lysandre Café do we receive more ominous hints about his plans – as with many Pokémon villains, the problem is in his absolutism, his willingness to divide all people in the world into “those who give and those who take” and declare all of the latter, most emphatically, “filth.”  This is the conversation that first suggests the existence of the Ultimate Weapon, and hints at Lysandre’s willingness to use it.  When he finally reveals his Team Flare allegiance to the world and explains his plans to wipe out the rest of humanity… well, it surprised me that he was willing to go so far for his “beautiful world,” but it’s not a total shock, put it that way.  His criteria for who gets to survive the imminent devastation are disheartening – “anyone who is a member of Team Flare, and no-one else,” which makes me question how well he really knows his members.  Would all of them really satisfy his idea of a person who will give and sacrifice to create a beautiful world?  Most are selfish, short-sighted and callous – exactly the kind of person you’d think Lysandre would normally deride as ‘filth’ – and they are able to enter his select group of followers not by proving that they will help to build and preserve a beautiful world, but by paying a truly mind-boggling membership fee.  The interesting thing is that, when we battle him for the first time in his lab beneath Lumiose City, Lysandre seems open to the possibility of letting the player join him and live in the new world.  More so than any other Pokémon villain, Lysandre is interested in our passion and the way we express our beliefs through battle – he’s a little like N that way.  Like N, he also seems almost like he might want a way out, like he might want to be stopped, on some level; he encourages us to fight him and his underlings, and is even willing to let us decide (after a fashion) whether the Ultimate Weapon will be activated.  In the end, though, Xerosic intervenes and we are forced to pursue Lysandre to Geosenge Town to confront him once more.

This is when we learn the dirty little secret, the part of his plan that disturbs even Lysandre: that there will be no place for Pokémon in his new world, not even those who belong to Team Flare.  Lysandre loves his Pokémon; his ability to harness Mega Evolution proves that, as Shauna observes.  In some ways his willingness to sacrifice them speaks to the strength of his convictions, but his reasoning is concerning.  As long as Pokémon exist, Lysandre believes, and as long as some people have Pokémon while others do not, people will use them to take more than their share and seize more power than they deserve.  Some of his research notes back in Lysandre Labs take the form of a broad sketch in anthropological terms of the genesis of inequality in civilisation (a problem that, in the real world, is one of the major areas of study in prehistoric archaeology), and place the impetus squarely with Pokémon – people who commanded Pokémon were able to amass wealth and influence, becoming great leaders.  He makes essentially the same point to us, far more briefly, in person.  The problem is that, despite all his love for his own Pokémon, he never considers that they might have a choice, or that their decisions might impact the way things turned out.  He thinks about the way their powers can be used, for good or ill, but not about how they will allow people to use them.  Remember what I said about the way Lysandre views Diantha as essentially passive?  He’s doing the same thing here.  He’s denying agency to Pokémon, who are clearly intelligent beings, and thinking about them as though they were little more than the extensions of their trainers’ will.  In short, by taking such a deterministic view of the effect Pokémon have on human society, he is committing one of the franchise’s cardinal sins: viewing Pokémon as tools.

 This man. What a dick. Seriously.

Lysandre reminds me – and many other people, I’m sure – very strongly of Cyrus (even sharing two Pokémon, Gyarados and Honchkrow, with his predecessor).  Both are acknowledged as intellectually brilliant, and their goals and beliefs are quite similar.  Both felt driven to crime by despair at the human condition and a belief that an ideal world could only be brought about by drastic and destructive means; Cyrus’s goal was to create a world without suffering – the problem was that he believed the ‘incomplete’ nature of the soul made suffering inevitable – while Lysandre wanted to create a utopia where the world’s resources were shared fairly and sustainably, but came to believe that the greed and laziness inherent in human nature made his vision impossible.  Both are charismatic leaders who command blind obedience, both have keen engineering skills, and both meet mysterious ends.  My trouble with Team Flare and Lysandre though, is that I think we’re supposed to have much more sympathy for them than I can muster.  No one ever asked us to like Cyrus.  The more generous amongst us might have appreciated a certain nobility in his desire to end all suffering, but there was never any question that he was Evil with a capital E.  People regularly ask us to like Lysandre, from Professors to rivals to random townspeople – largely because, unlike the cold and emotionless Cyrus, Lysandre actually cares, and seems to feel genuine remorse even as he continues to work towards his goals.  He seems like he’s meant to be a tragic figure, but having seen so little of his famed philanthropy, I find it difficult to empathise.  In some ways, I think, Lysandre is even worse than Cyrus, because Cyrus’ decisions and actions were very impersonal.  Cyrus felt that life itself was fundamentally broken; killing everyone wasn’t exactly part of his goals, but he felt it was a reasonable sacrifice to make for the chance to create a perfect universe.  Lysandre, on the other hand, just unilaterally decided that most of the people in the world deserved to die for wasting the planet’s limited resources.  As for Team Flare – well, they may not have been pleasant people, but at least Team Galactic and Team Plasma were genuinely in the dark about the true extent of their leaders’ motives (even one of the Galactic admins, Saturn, had no idea Cyrus was trying to destroy the universe and become a god).  Team Flare seem to have known all along what havoc their master was planning – they regularly speak of their desire to create a beautiful word, just for them, and as far as we see no-one abandons Lysandre in shock when he announces his plan to all of Kalos – yet even at the end, Malva is able to claim with a straight face that she did what she thought was right.

I keep coming back to Serena’s words in the battle with her on Victory Road, because I think they encapsulate what the writers intended us to take from this story, and how far that is from what I actually took from it: “Lysandre chose only Team Flare.  You and I chose everyone but Team Flare.  But since our positions forced our hands, you can’t really say any of us were right.  So maybe if both sides have something to say, it’s best to meet halfway.”  Well, okay; that would have been fair enough if we had met Lysandre ten years ago and he had been saying “we need to move Kalos in a more socialist direction and commit ourselves to sustainability.”  Unfortunately, it seems pretty clear that even by the time we first meet him he has already gone off the deep end and is merely hiding it, so that his position is actually “I have no choice but to kill all of you, and your pets.”  How exactly does one “meet halfway” with that?  As far as I can make out, the writers were trying really hard to make Lysandre a tragic and morally ambiguous villain, and even thought they had succeeded, but we get little opportunity to see his positive traits for ourselves, are given the chance to understand his descent into evil only in retrospect, and are eventually asked to sympathise with a man who tried to destroy everyone we have ever loved for the ‘greater good’… of himself and his band of thugs.

Honestly, I think there’s only one way now to achieve the aims the writers actually had in mind for Team Flare and Lysandre: the next sixth generation game has to be a prequel.

Speaking of fairy type, if they ever remake the 2nd generation games again, or just reintroduce Whitney in some way, what do you think they’ll do to Whitney’s team? Do you think they’ll acknowledge that a normal-type specialist has a pure fairy on her team, or will they either replace clefairy or miltank with a normal or fairy type respectfully? Or will they just give up and make her one of the only gym leaders with more than one type preference?

Well, I can’t really speak for what they will do, mostly since I don’t think they’ll remake the second generation games again.  I can talk about what I think they should do, or what I would do – which is to say “f*ck it” because what Whitney likes are “cute Pokémon” and Normal and Fairy both have those in abundance.  It’s not like she’d be the first major opponent to look outside her speciality; Sabrina has a Venomoth, Candice has a Medicham, Volkner has an Ambipom and an Octillery, the Striaton triplets all have Lillipup, and several Elite Four members are all over the place.  They could even reference the fact that Clefairy was once thought to be a Normal-type until Fairy Pokémon became better-understood.

Also, there’s a fourth possibility you haven’t mentioned – make Whitney a Fairy-type specialist, keep Miltank as a lone Normal-type and give her a different signature Pokémon, like Clefable.  Why not?

Reading your reviews of Unova Pokemon, I notice you condemned quite a few of them for tricks they didn’t have when you wrote the article, but obtained later. For example- Braviary was damned for a lack of Roost, which he got through BW2 tutors and XY TMs, and Genesect partially because Techno Blast was an inferior Flamethrower/ Thunderbolt/whatever, while it is now more accurate and more powerful than Thunder, Fire Blast, etc. Would you think about reconsidering these Pokemon?

It sounds like a lot of work.  Someone should totally do that.