AceTrainerAlvaro asks:

The Pokémon brand remains sheepishly heteronormative (ie, Steven Stone & Wallace are just best guy friends *wink*). On that note, the move Attract should be low-key rejiggered to also affect targets of the same gender, with its overall accuracy reduced somewhat (say down to 85 or 90%) to reflect the slightly lower incidence of same-sex interactions among animals. Frankly, it’s 2019 & kids across the globe are well-aware that LGBTQ people & same-sex “infatuation” (to borrow an in-game term) exist, stop pretending otherwise, Game Freak. Thoughts?

I mean, honestly, I don’t think there’s really any compelling game balance reason you couldn’t just have Attract work on all gendered Pokémon (or even just all Pokémon) with 100% accuracy. That’d still be strictly worse than Confuse Ray was in generations I through VI, because infatuation wears off if either the user or the target switches out, and an attack that fails due to confusion comes with some extra damage (in generation VII, the chance of a confused Pokémon hurting itself drops to 33%, so it’s a bit murkier now, but still; we can always nerf infatuation by a similar amount, just to keep “parattraction” from becoming a frustrating metagame force). All Pokémon are bi now. Really, why not? This isn’t even all that out of step with nature; there are species where same-sex sexual interactions seem to be more common (for one or both sexes) than opposite-sex ones, like giraffes. It doesn’t even have to signify homosexuality if people want to be prudish about it; you can just make it a joke, like “he’s so hot even the straight guys want him,” which is a joke the anime has made with Meowth and a wild Purrloin (also, like… straight guys… there’s one, right? You might not say it out loud, but there’s always one. We share this blessed earth with the corporeal incarnations of Hugh Jackman, Rock “the Dwayne” Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Idris Elba, for goodness’ sake; you’re allowed one). The fact is, we don’t know anything about Pokémon sexuality. Nothing is canon and nothing is sacred; Game Freak have made sure of that. We know it usually takes a male and a female to produce an egg, but the games keep insisting that no one knows how it happens, and also claim that eggs “aren’t really eggs,” and permit all kinds of… anatomically improbable pairings (ArcheOPS WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THAT CLAWITZER). I’m not sure it would make the system any more implausible even if you straight-up allowed Pokémon to breed and produce offspring regardless of gender (there are single-gender species already, and they must reproduce somehow).

VikingBoyBilly asks:

Why is azurill so screwed up? In gen 6 they had a chance to fix it, and all they did was make it normal/fairy. umm, what? Most of what’s wrong with azurill is obvious, but one tidbit I think is less than well known is it can’t get aqua jet, making it better to breed marills instead.

For the benefit of other readers: I’m pretty sure what Billy is referring to is Azurill’s gender… issues. Marill and Azumarill, who were second-generation Pokémon, have a standard gender ratio – half of them are male and half are female. Someone on the programming team evidently forgot about this when Azurill was added in the third generation, because they gave her a skewed gender ratio – only one quarter of all Azurill are male. This isn’t, in itself, unusual. Lots of Pokémon are like this – Clefairy and Vulpix, for example – but the gender ratio normally stays the same across evolutions. Azurill’s doesn’t. Because of the way the game’s coding determines an individual Pokémon’s gender, this means that one in every three female Azurill will actually become male upon evolving. You can go and hatch a few Azurill now if you want to see it happen. No other Pokémon does this.

So I think what you’re basically asking is “why don’t Game Freak change this? They’ve had three generations to do it” and, well, obviously the answer is because they either haven’t noticed or don’t care. The former seems unlikely; they don’t exactly pay a lot of attention to the fan community but it’s not like they live under a rock. So I guess they probably don’t care. And I don’t think I do either. It was almost certainly a mistake initially, but it’s an amusing one that makes Azurill unique, and it doesn’t actually break anything in the game. And, in a way, it makes Ruby and Sapphire among the first ever video games to have a playable transgender character. Even if it was… y’know… probably by accident. Is that… bad? I certainly don’t think so.

Obligatory link to further ramblings on Pokémon gender from the archive.

Anonymous asks:

Nice and informative goodra fact, but why you referred to it as a “she?” It seems the community wants to make goodra a female only Pokemon for some reason. Still, thanks for the insights, I liked them!

I offer no explanations, justifications or apologies for my brain’s subjective gendering of Pokémon designs (which often makes little sense even to me), nor do I expect such from others.