Okay; the first expansion for Pokémon: Sword and Shield is out today, so let’s do this thing! Same as with my initial playthrough of Shield, in the interests of being timely I’m not going to spend time writing a super detailed or analytical write-up; I’m just going to bullet-point things as they occur to me, and if there’s something I want to write an article on, we’ll figure it out later (at the very least, we know there’s at least one extra regional form, which will have to be tacked on the end of the series I’m currently writing [also the next one of those is almost done; I know it’s taking ages and it was probably a mistake to try and do four Pokémon at once, but it won’t be much longer]). Anyway, here we go!
Continue reading “Isle of Armour time!”Grass monkey, that funky monkey, GRASS MONKEY! asks:
So, the Greek God Apollo, he is definitely bi right?
Well, there’s a bunch of caveats I have to rattle off whenever someone asks a question like this, ‘cause in ancient Greek culture there’s no such thing as “bi” or “gay” – and there’s definitely no such thing as “straight.” The categories simply don’t exist; there are no words for them in the ancient Greek language. Personally, I think we have reason to believe that the whole concept of being exclusively attracted to only one gender would have seemed a bit alien to the ancient Greeks. It’s just… kind of normal for adult men – men who are married to women and happily participating in a strictly patriarchal and, weirdly, kind of heteronormative social structure – to also be attracted to younger men and teenage boys, and indeed to have sex with them. What’s more, this is totally fine, because in general Greek marriage customs only require that a married woman should not have sex with any men other than her husband (and Sparta had exceptions to even that rule; I also kind of suspect that extramarital lesbian relationships might have been common as well, but that’s a lot harder to track, because almost all our written sources come from male perspectives and they just have an extremely rudimentary understanding of female sexuality). Marriage is a very functional, utilitarian, transactional thing; you get married in order to produce legitimate male heirs who will inherit your property and your place in the social fabric of your city. That’s a duty that you have not just to your family but to your entire community, because it ensures continuity of land ownership, and land is where the community lives and produces food. The point I’m trying to make is that male/male romantic or sexual relationships are doing different things from male/female ones, in a way that wouldn’t have left much room for a modern conception of same-sex relationships, where we want to be seen as equal and equivalent to straight people.
Continue reading “Grass monkey, that funky monkey, GRASS MONKEY! asks:”Tapu Wooloo asks:
A while back, you cautiously played with the idea of replacing the physical/special split with a spectrum, where Flare Blitz would be 80% physical and 20% special for instance. You said this would probably be too radical. But what if there were just a “mixed” category of moves (50% physical and 50% special)? You could change some moves to mixed (like Rock Throw, Razor Leaf, Earthquake etc) and in exchange buff their power a bit.
then clarifies:
On second thought, “mixed” attacks wouldn’t need a power buff, since they’d be as hard to defend against as to attack with. But my question remains the same otherwise.
um
what… exactly did I say…?
Oh, here it is.
So… it’s been a while and I can’t testify with 100% certainty to my state of mind when I wrote that, but I think when I said “such a radical change I’m not even sure I’d want to do it,” I didn’t mean “this is too much of a departure and the fan base would never buy it,” so much as “I am worried this might break some important aspects of the game’s strategy in a way that isn’t immediately obvious to me and can’t be balanced out in a straightforward way.” If you have this category of mixed moves, then the whole concept of “wall” Pokémon changes quite significantly, because it’s much less viable to focus on just one type of defence, which in turn shifts the balance of the game significantly towards offence. That may be totally fine, but I don’t know, and I don’t really have the capacity to find out. It’s a sufficiently foundational change to the battle system that I’m nervous about unreservedly declaring that it’s a good idea, and I’m not sure that it’s possible to work that out theoretically. On the other hand, we do have Psyshock, a special attack that does physical damage, which hasn’t broken anything, and “mixed” attacks would be more demanding of attackers as well, who’d need to invest in both attack stats. So maybe it’s completely fine? I don’t know. That’s all that means; I still don’t know.
jeffthelinguist asks:
I was wondering what your thoughts are on how Pokemon Masters handles typings. Now, I know the game is a shameless gacha cash grab so in the likely chance you haven’t touched it (and for good reason): Pokemon don’t have a type, exactly. Pokémon moves all have a type and Pokemon themselves each have one individual weakness. So while Blastoise is weak to electric, Feraligatr is weak to grass. Most Pokemon only have moves of one type which is probably the most relevant factor, though some have two move types (like Ho-Oh having fire, Overheat, and grass, Solar Beam). Now maybe having one weakness is oversimplifying, but having weaknesses depending on an individual basis and reserving typings for moves does have its own implications. Thoughts?
Well, I wanted to give Masters a try when it first came out, but the fact is, my phone is just too $#!tty to run it with anything resembling acceptable performance, and I’m not about to change my lifelong policy of carrying only the $#!ttiest phone on the market just for this game. So I don’t really know how this works out in practice. In general I’m in favour of simplifying Pokémon’s type system and I have in the past suggested… well, basically the elements of this system that you’re highlighting, but I think with only one weakness and two moves (potentially two moves of the same type) per Pokémon, this might be too simple to transfer well to the core games. Masters has triple battles as its default format and focuses much more heavily on trainers’ ability to support their Pokémon, so it simply doesn’t need to place the same weight on the Pokémon themselves; it has other avenues for creating complexity.
Son of Iris asks:
I know this blog is about Pokemon, but due to your recent chain on twitter about a Percy Jackson TV series, how would you rate & rank each of Riordan’s books, at least the ones you have read in full.
honestly, dude, I’ve had so many classics questions coming in lately I don’t actually know what this blog is anymore
I’m not going to do a whole rank-and-rate numbered list thing, because… frankly there’s a lot of them. That just sounds like more work than I want to do, especially since it’s been a while since I read most of them; like, the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians books came out when I was a teenager and I don’t think I’ve reread any of them in full since then; I also haven’t read book 4 of Trials of Apollo yet. I think the Magnus Chase books are probably my favourites in the Percy Jackson ‘verse, which is not entirely because of Alex Fierro but honestly that’s a pretty significant factor. I think those books are also a really good example of how minority representation in fiction is good, not just for people who don’t often get to see characters like them in media, but because working with diverse perspectives can actually make a story just flat-out more interesting. Riordan’s whole schtick is reinventing mythology as a presence in the modern world, and that just works better with the widest possible range of character backgrounds.
Continue reading “Son of Iris asks:”Tapu Wooloo asks:
Now that regional variants are a thing, can you revisit your article on Beautifly and Dustox and say what more you would do with them?
ugggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh
so the thing about Beautifly and Dustox
is that there’s no reason for them to exist
and I know I try not to say things like this anymore, and I try to be nice about Pokémon that are a bit dull or pointless, and I’m just a more chill and friendly persona now and try to keep my violent rage against the entire universe buried under a few thousand layers of self-loathing and cream cheese icing, and I don’t even think that article is good anymore, we’ve simply moved on, Tapu Wooloo, but my god, WHY ARE Beautifly and Dustox? What, actually, is the point?
I mean, really, there’s an argument that Beautifly and Dustox are already just Hoennese forms of Butterfree and Venomoth.
I don’t even know what you’d do with them that justifies using them and not any other butterfly or moth Pokémon. Vivillon is kinda the obviously more interesting butterfly Pokémon to work with as a regional variant because it has them already; they just weren’t called that at the time; you could retcon all its existing forms by giving them more significant cosmetic and mechanical differences and suddenly you have a whole bunch of regional variants, most of them for regions we haven’t even visited yet! I guess there must be something that makes use of Wurmple’s split evolution, right? Something sun/moon-themed might have been good, because Beautifly and Dustox have a day/night duality to them and Dustox is based on a luna moth, but we kinda missed the perfect opportunity for that with Alola (and you’d have to be careful not to step on Volcarona’s toes, because Beautifly 100% does not survive that comparison). The most interesting thing about Beautifly is it can stab you with its face and drink your blood, so I guess I would like to work more with that, but how you would actually go about it depends on the region you were building, I guess. You could flip the day/night thing on its head and have, like, a vampire Beautifly with a black and red colour scheme, then make Dustox into something vaguely day- or sun-themed, maybe imitating the colours of a monarch butterfly… that works better mechanically too, because Dustox is already support-oriented and wouldn’t be so obviously trying to compete with Volcarona. Needs more than that, of course, but it’s a start.
I know this is not a particularly satisfying answer, but this question has seriously been in my inbox for weeks, and the sincere answer is honestly “nothing, why would there be anything?” so… y’know, I’m trying, is the point.
The original dragon from Unova asls:
I know remakes are going to be a thing forever, but what are your thoughts on games using the same region, but with an entirely different plot, and entirely new Pokemon. For example, before Let’s Go P/E was revealed, there were all these wild rumors about a Kanto Region in the future with all new Pokemon, Gorochu, submerged Pallet Town, a snake legendary, etc.
I dunno that I have “thoughts” on it, exactly. It’s a thing you could do. I mean, it’s a thing Black and White 2 did, and those games are pretty well regarded in the fan community, from what I’ve seen (there probably isn’t much merit in using an existing region and deliberately keeping no connections at all to the previous plot – if you’re not using the background, then the freedom of a new setting is probably more valuable). I don’t think it’s necessarily better or worse than setting a game in a completely new region; the latter gives you a blank slate for developing new ideas and themes, and the former emphasises continuity. I honestly do think there is a lot to be said for the blank slate, but sometimes having a pre-existing developed setting with dense lore and history can also be useful for storytelling – that’s why fan fiction is a thing. I probably wouldn’t do a whole new generation’s worth of Pokémon designs for a new game set in an existing region, though.
Ace Trainer Fox asks:
What pokemon do you want to get future regional forms? If you need a basis, for a region based on say, greece?
This is a tricky question to answer, because yeah, it really does kinda depend on the region. To my mind, the best thing about regional forms is that they illustrate the region’s identity and culture, or the way Pokémon have adapted to the particular challenges of living there. There are no Pokémon that I think should get regional forms, because that’s the opposite of how I think about the question. But then again, despite being an archaeologist who works in Greece, I’ve also never been enthusiastic about the idea of a Pokémon region based on Greece, either; I just think there are other choices that would be more interesting. When people ask, I usually say that I’d like a region based on India. There are a few obvious choices for regional variants there that could incorporate references to Indian history and culture into their designs, although I don’t have any specific ideas for how to do that off the top of my head: Arbok, because cobras are Indian. Copperajah, because elephants are Indian. Medicham, because Buddhism started in India. Raikou, because tigers are Indian (and we may as well drag Suicune and Entei into it). Machamp, because divine beings in Indian art are so often human-shaped with extra pairs of arms. Miltank, because cows are symbolically important in Hinduism. Do something with Claydol that uses motifs from the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilisation. You get the idea.
Nothronychus asks:
What’s your favorite hellenistic Greek City-State and why?
So, even as a classicist it has never really occurred to me to have a favourite Hellenistic Greek city-state (because… why?). Maybe this makes me a bad classicist. But it really seems like a weird thing to have, because we usually think of the Hellenistic period as the era when the city states don’t particularly matter anymore; it’s all about empires and god-kings. So I had this hour-long discussion with Jim the Editor about what possible valid answers this question could even have, because what still counts as a city-state in the Archaic-to-Classical Greek sense? He doesn’t think anything that’s part of one of the big kingdoms counts, because city-states are supposed to have political autonomy – so we can’t pick the really big centres like Alexandria or Antioch, and Jim thinks Pergamon does still count, whereas I don’t think you can count Pergamon if you’re not also willing to count Alexandria (and anyway, can’t you be both a city state and the capital of an empire? I mean… Athens and the Delian League, for fµ¢£’s sake). And then what even counts as Greek, because all this stuff is, like… Greco-Macedonian(-Persian?) koine that doesn’t closely resemble classical Greece in its politics, society or culture; the only ones that you could reasonably argue aren’t a little Macedonian by this point are the western colonies (Syracuse, Neapolis, Tarentum, Massilia, etc.) and Sparta (and no one, at all, in the world cares about Hellenistic Sparta). Or you can swing wildly in the other direction and argue with equal merit that everything is Greek, because I have definitely heard people suggest, only a little bit ironically, that Rome is in practice a Greek city-state up until basically the Punic Wars (especially if you buy into Dionysius’ “the Romans are totally Greek, guys!” bull$#!t).
So yeah, I dunno. My actual favourite is probably Cyrene but they only barely make it into the Hellenistic period with their independence so maybe that’s not in the spirit of the thing. Rhodes is cool. Colossus of Helios, obviously. Lots of good glasswork done on Rhodes in the Hellenistic period too, and I am nothing if not a glass nerd. Syracuse has Archimedes’ giant death laser (I want to believe, okay???). Hellenistic Athens is really interesting, actually; like, we all fixate on the Classical stuff in Athens but they get up to just as much Game of Thrones bull$#!t as any Hellenistic monarch in trying to preserve their independence and democratic traditions. They also have this fascinating position as, like, the ex-cultural capital of the Greek world that they continue to leverage for political gain well into the time of the Roman Empire. These are certainly some opinions that I have.
Rane and Alleen ask:
Who was right, Aegon or Rhaenyra?
So, I didn’t know the deep lore of A Song of Ice and Fire well enough to remember on my own exactly who Aegon and Rhaenyra are or what there was for either of them to be right about, so take this with a grain of salt… but I talked to Jim the Editor about this and read part of a wiki article, and it seems pretty clear-cut that Rhaenyra was the rightful heir and got fµ¢£ed over? I mean… it’s A Song of Ice and Fire so obviously the whole story is ridiculously complicated and I assume everyone involved was absolutely awful in one way or another, but the actual inciting dispute of the civil war feels to me like an open-and-shut case.
Pokémaniacal 