I think I might have seen it before?  It’s not really something I’d want to spend much time looking at, partly because it would probably suck me in, partly because it’s the sort of thing that I keep thinking I might want to do myself someday (not sure I ever actually will, because it’d be such a horrendously massive project, but it’s something I would do if I had unlimited time), and I don’t really want a whole lot of other people’s ideas floating around in my head if I ever do.  It looks like a solid effort, for the most part.

Well… to be honest I kinda feel like that’s just reading way too much into it… and it’s also probably worth noting that there are no three-stage Electric-types in generation one (although whether that would necessarily have mattered in the formative stages of the game is hard to say)… but… oh, what the hell, let’s go look at the damn hex numbers and see if that says anything.

(Obligatory explanation for anyone reading this who doesn’t know what these are: every Pokémon has a unique hexadecimal (base-16) number that identifies it within the games’ coding; from Ruby and Sapphire onward these ID numbers follow Pokédex order, but in the games from the first two generations they’re all over the place, and we think they represent the order in which Pokémon were created, since Rhydon is 01 and we know independently that he was the first design ever.  It’s therefore possible – if you’re sufficiently credulous – to mine this list for patterns that tell us things about the design process of the original Pokémon games.)

So, I’m pretty sure the establishment of Grass/Water/Fire as the standard starter trio actually did happen very late.  This is because Squirtle, Wartortle, Charmander, Charmeleon and Charizard turn up all together at B0 to B4, near the very end of the list, and I think this represents the moment they decided on a selection of three three-stage starters.  Bulbasaur and Venusaur come in a little while before that; Ivysaur and Blastoise have both been around for ages by this point.  So, on the one hand, there is good reason for thinking that the mechanism by which players received their first Pokémon was fluid for a long time during the game’s development, but on the other hand it’s the Fire and Water starters who are late to the party, not the Grass-type.  It’s sort of difficult to come up with anything more solid than that… although you can, I suppose, look for places in the list where Grass, Water and Fire types seem like they could have been designed all together – there aren’t any – or for places where Water, Fire and Electric types seem like they could have been designed all together… and there are, interestingly, two of those.  One is the set of Pikachu, Vulpix, and a Pokémon that was actually rejected from Red and Blue but ultimately resurfaced in Gold and Silver as Remoraid (EDIT: take this with a grain of salt – see comments section).  The other… the other is Eevee and her evolutions, and Eevee’s role in Yellow Version does make it awfully tempting to suggest that maybe she was intended as the starter Pokémon up until Charmander and Squirtle were designed.  Total conjecture, of course.  Can’t prove a word of it.  But it’s interesting to speculate.

Well, the thing is, the confusion between the two actually isn’t purely a modern one – the similarity between the names Kronos and Chronos was one that the ancient Greeks noticed too.  There’re references in Plutarch and in the pseudo-Aristotelian De Mundo that seem to point to a popular belief that the two gods were actually the same dude – and then there’s whole alternate versions of the creation myth that seem to conflate them, like the one in Pherecydes’ Heptamychos, where Chronos, Kronos and Zeus (whom Pherecydes calls Zas) all seem to bleed together to some extent.  Also, you gotta remember that our notion of Greek cosmology is based almost entirely on Hesiod, who is only the oldest and most broadly acknowledged written version of what was probably an extremely heterogeneous tradition with all kinds of bizarre variants that are mostly or completely lost to us.  So basically… it’s okay, the ancients couldn’t keep that one straight either. 😉

Three possibilities.

a) Her sister was a right bitch.

b) She hopes that the man she believes to be her soulmate will attend her sister’s funeral, giving her another shot.

c) Her sister was a fetus in fetu which, entirely by coincidence, she was getting removed that week anyway.

Athena.  Duh.  What bloody good is a salt water spring?

…how did this become my job all of a sudden?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure about that one.  Not just because I am generally prepared to trust the consensus of the global scientific community, but because, although NASA apparently had the technology to go to the moon in 1969, they didn’t have the technology to convincingly fake it on video.

Well, to be honest, I think “our brains are awesome” covers an awful lot, don’t you?  Earlier this week the European Space Agency landed a probe on a comet, for goodness’ sake.  Our species has literally caught a shooting star.  What is it about piling rocks up in a bloody great triangle that’s so miraculous people have to say aliens did it?

Well, I suppose the cop-out answer would be ‘the Pokémon’… but I’m not even sure *that’s* true; I’ve more than once contemplated the idea of a Pokémon fan-fic without any Pokémon in it.

I’ll just let you all muse on that one for a minute.

Seriously, though, I’m really not sure you can pin that down to anything.  For me, the core themes of the games are the joy of discovery and the importance of living in harmony with nature.  You could write a Pokémon story that isn’t about those things at all, though (I mean, people have), and I suspect that as long as it had the creatures in it, people would still accept it as ‘Pokémon.’  For a moment there I thought about saying ‘well, partnership between the creatures and humans has to be important,’ but then again, Mystery Dungeon.  You can say ‘friendship has to be a central theme,’ and I think that’s probably true, but it’s also far from unique.  It’s sort of a whole mess of things, and you can go without any one or two of them.

…

…excuse me; let me just write this one down on my list of accomplishments that I will never, ever put on my CV.

“Inspired… Pokémon fan-fic… about… bestiality.”

Right.  Anyway.

If you’re asking for advice, I… guess my position is, as it has always been, do what you want if you can tell a good story; I mean, if you’re interested in grappling with the morality of a romantic relationship with that kind of inherent inequality in a fantasy setting, well, it’s not like it can possibly hurt anyone.  Just… and don’t take this the wrong way, but… please, please don’t drag me into this.