Anonymous asks:

This doesn’t have anything to do with pokemon, but I was wondering if you might have any thoughts with your Archaeology background: In a lot of stuff written about Greco-Roman mythology I’ve read, Hectate is called a goddess of witchcraft and Circe a witch, and there’s probably other examples I don’t know of. However, I’m not really sure what being a witch would mean outside of the context of Christianity or modern pop-culture. Was this just something that was added in by much later writers?

Well, what is a witch, exactly? Ugly old woman, warty nose, pointy hat, flies around on broomsticks, brews potions in cauldrons, turns people into newts, weighs the same as a duck, that sort of thing? Circe, Hecate and Medea aren’t witches in that sense, no; they predate that stereotype of what a “witch” is by a good couple of millennia. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Phi8 asks:

Why do you think Kyogre was flying in the last episode of Generations? Isn’t it supposed to be swimming, since it’s a whale/fish? Because if it’s flying it actually shares a lot of similarities with Lugia, who also flies and also summons storms and also has weird fins/wings with fingers on it.

Well, I don’t think it needs to fly to be similar to Lugia; they’re both colossal aquatic guardians of the deep ocean, even if Lugia isn’t a literal Water-type. But as to the question… well, since Kyogre’s primal form is transparent and doesn’t seem to have much in the way of insides, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it turned out to be somehow made of “spiritual energy” or something, and just isn’t subject to gravity to the same degree as its normal form (note that the primal form is more than twice as long, and presumably twice as wide and twice as tall, so we should probably expect it to be more than eight times heavier, but in fact its weight increases by less than 25%). Besides, do you want to be the one to tell Primal Kyogre that it can’t fly?

Anonymous asks:

Do you believe it possible that part of the reason for assigning type to a Pokémon – and a potential answer to the enduring question of what a type is and how those so labelled fit under its umbrella – might lie in some energy form infusing those Pokémon? I think of Voltorb, obviously a pokéball that came to life, and the question becomes, what is it “possessing” or animating this pokéball? Something alive and powerful – is it possible then, that electricity itself is animating the ball? Not mundane electricity but the – forgive me – “essence” of electricity, one of many underlying let’s say “mystical” life energies that associate with natural phenomena in this world? A pokemon’s type, then, is the form of such energy that permeates it, that it channels of draws upon, and which connects its biology (or geology, etc.) to this empowered form of “life”, bestowing on it its abilities?

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