Lizardman Lizardman asks:

Fun fact: one of the most feared Pokemon in Anything Goes is not Mega Rayquaza, or some Arceus forme… It’s Vivillon. Just thought you’d like to know.

Well “one of the most feared” is a bit of an exaggeration; she’s a bit niche and very high-risk/high-reward, but even that much is a hell of an achievement for a cookie-cutter early-game butterfly. Honestly I think this says less about Vivillon than about how heinously overpowered sleep is in Pokémon, even after being nerfed in four out of six generations, and how completely we all tend to forget about that most of the time. Smogon has a rule (and I think other communities use this as well) that you can only put one Pokémon to sleep at a time, and their influence on the competitive Pokémon community is so great that even in contexts where their rules don’t apply (like most official tournaments) people kind of act as if they did – partly, I think, because the strategies banned by rules like this are just incredibly dickish and make the game a lot less fun for everyone. Of course, in Smogon’s “anything goes” tier… well, anything goes. Vivillon is faster than Butterfree and gets Compoundeyes Hurricane, and Sun and Moon nerfed the cr@p out of Darkrai’s Dark Void, so if you want to spam a very high-accuracy sleep technique, she’s the one to do it with. I mean, yes, Quiver Dance is part of it, because without it Vivillon would be outrun and one-shot by practically everything, but when you have all the legendary Pokémon in the game to work with, the offensive presence of a Quiver Dance Vivillon, while significant, isn’t that big a deal – which is why we would never have this conversation in the “uber” tier, where the sleep rules still apply. Sleep really is just that good. This is one of the reasons you shouldn’t automatically defer to the competitive zeitgeist when choosing Pokémon and movesets for single-player, not even in end-game battle facilities – it’s not actually the same game.

Tony the Tiger asks:

You like old stuff, right? What are your thoughts on fossil pokemon?

In general archaeologists take pains to point out that we do not study fossils (it’s a surprisingly common mistake). Not all “old stuff” is similarly old (unless you listen to certain ill-advised religious sects); I deal in the hundreds/thousands of years range, not millions/tens of millions. Fossils are about as much my professional area of expertise as the moons of Jupiter are an airline pilot’s.

…as it happens, though, I am independently a layman dinosaur nerd with a basic knowledge of evolutionary biology, and I was a sufficiently weird kid that, when I started school, I wanted to be not a fireman or an astronaut but a palaeontologist. So LET’S TALK FOSSILS.

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Hyper Beam asks:

How would you…in glorious detail…imagine kyurem, zekrom, and reshiram finally combined?

(Disclaimer first: I’m not a designer or an artist, and a Google image search would give you multiple answers to this question that are better than anything you’ll get from me)

The thing is, I actually like that Game Freak never gave us a final realisation of this concept. Whatever they came up with, it would not have lived up to our expectations or done justice to the idea. The original primordial dragon represents the totality of all truths and the realisation of all ideals, the reconciliation of every pair of opposites and the resolution of every conflict. I suggest, though I obviously cannot prove, that the reason it never appears in the games is because Game Freak realised that there is no satisfying way to depict that, and decided it was better left as a mysterious background presence in the lore. Sometimes it’s more effective to leave things to the imagination; there’s a reason some horror movies never show the monster. A big mass of black and white wings and scales and $#!t is not as evocative or meaningful as the vague suggestion, buried in layers of mythology, of a primordial being who symbolises the impossible unity of all divisions. Frankly I think Pokémon could do with more of that kind of restraint, not less.

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Pokémottos #776

House Turtonator: Boom Goes the Dynamite

Pokémon and the “Insect Apocalypse”

So, recently I read this article from the New York Times Magazine about the growing evidence for a precipitous decline in global insect populations over the last couple of decades, a phenomenon that has gone largely unnoticed until quite recently (except as it pertains to a few species we care about, like honeybees) because insects are just so hard to count. Because the available data is still quite limited, it’s hard to draw detailed conclusions about what’s happening, how fast, and how we can stop it, though it seems like a good bet that global climate change and indiscriminate use of pesticides are probably both involved.

Now, to most well-informed people this is clearly part of the ongoing social, political and technological crisis around humanity’s relationship with the natural environment of our planet, and probably brings to mind any number of ecological catastrophes brought about by human agency, the debate over what kind of action is necessary to prevent or mitigate similar catastrophes in the future, and so on and so forth. But for me, as a lifelong Pokémon fan with an analytical bent and a more-than-passing interest in Pokémon’s origins, my mind went instead to the childhood hobby that Satoshi Tajiri dreamed of sharing with children who couldn’t experience it in an increasingly hyper-urbanised Japan: insect collecting. The people who collected the data that sounded the alarm to the scientific community, and allowed this article to be written, are people like Tajiri might have grown up to be, in another life: amateur collectors who, for the most part, aren’t professional scientists, but still do the hard work of science while receiving little of the glory, all for the love of bugs. They are real-world Pokédex compilers, whose contributions don’t depend on exhaustive formal education or sophisticated experiments, but on the foundational scientific skills of observation and curiosity. Their work is Pokémon’s spiritual heritage… and everything they study is slowly dying.

And I’m not sure if Pokémon has the capacity or even the desire to pass meaningful comment on it.

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Anonymous asks:

very important question: if you had to fistfight one of the middle stages of any of the starter pokemon, which one do you think you could beat and why?

Well, out of the ones that have fists, I would probably pick Braixen ‘cause no way does she have the upper body strength to throw a decent punch.

Anonymous asks:

What’s your favorite Legendary Pokémon, and why? We all know it’s not Rayquaza (because of Emerald) or Arceus (because of The Jewel of Life), but which one’s your favorite (or favorites, in the case of duos or trios)?

That’s a hard one… You’re right that it’s not Arceus because Jewel of Life can rot in hell, and also because the whole “god Pokémon” thing just does stuff to the setting that I don’t really like, and which I’m not convinced anyone ever thought through. It’s also not Rayquaza, although I actually feel that Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby quite satisfactorily redeem the mess that was made of Rayquaza’s involvement in Emerald (though Deoxys is just a total Giant Space Flea from Nowhere). I like the designs of Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, but I’m less keen on the fact that (in the games at least) they have nothing to do with anything. Similarly, I’m fond of Cobalion, Virizion and Terrakion’s backstory, which I think is really interesting, but I was incredibly underwhelmed by how little they had to do with the story of Black and White, considering how directly invested they are in the ideological conflict behind the plot. You know, all things considered, I actually might go with Xerneas and Yveltal as joint winners; the designs are really evocative, they enabled an interesting story with some cool themes in X and Y, and the way they’re described hits a good spot on the “cosmic power” scale, where you can appreciate that these things might have region-wide significance, but they don’t necessarily place the power to unmake the universe in the hands of a ten-year-old trainer the way Dialga and Palkia do.

Anonymous asks:

You could maybe tie the Aphrodite Pokemon thing with encantados, Brazilian dolphins who take human shape, go to parties, and seduce women back to the water with them. Maybe throw in a mermaid/siren angle too? It’s deceptive and sometimes pretends to be a human. It can sing a beautiful song that’s lured sailors into wrecking their ships. Though this is just starting to sound like Mega Lapras or something of the sort.

Well, the thing is, at this point you’re doing a Pokémon based on the encantado, not on Aphrodite – which, to be honest, I think is sort of a better place to start anyway. The notion of Pokémon based on the Greek gods doesn’t really sit all that well with me, just because the whole point of the Greek gods is how human-like they are in their moods, desires and flaws. It’s really interesting from a cultural or theological perspective, but kind of “meh” as a basis for designing Pokémon. Or at least, that’s what I think.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

How come heatran has sexes (not ‘genders’) and can’t breed? It’s the only legendary that is like this (Latias and Latios have fixed sexes, Manaphy can breed).

Well, Latias and Latios probably have genders because they’re supposed to reference Gnostic aeons, which come in male/female pairs (I’m not altogether convinced by this interpretation, but it’s the best suggestion I’ve seen for what they’re about); Manaphy can breed because being a legendary Pokémon that can breed is Manaphy’s particular gimmick. Heatran… well, to be honest my best guess (and I do not think it is a terribly good one, but it’s what I’ve got) is that Heatran was originally not intended to be a legendary Pokémon, and somehow its genders were retained by mistake. There isn’t really anything particularly “legendary” about Heatran other than its stats, after all, particularly not in comparison to some of the other nonsense going on in the fourth generation. If you’re looking for an in-universe explanation, I would say that Heatran can and do breed – but since they’ll only lay their eggs in a volcano that isn’t already claimed by another Heatran, good bloody luck to anyone who wants to try it.