Katiecat asks:

I was reading your eeveelutions reviews. You mention the whole “adaptations” thing isn’t really done that well, since most of them don’t really match their environments all that well.
Theoretically, how would you design an octet of eeveelutions to go with different environments from scratch? I have my own but I wanna hear what you’d do first.
The other thing you mention is that they go for many different aesthetics, such as cute (flareon/sylveon), cool (jolteon), beautiful (vaporeon/glaceon), and mysterious, but kind of leave off a brutish aesthetic. I would also add they leave off the under-appreciated weird aesthetic- the dunsparces and exeggcutes of the world that end up in “top 20 worst pokemon” lists but a small number of us keep close to our hearts.

What catastrophically awful person puts Dunsparce on a Top 20 Worst Anything list?

So, some of the eeveelutions I actually am totally fine with; I’d just associate them with different environments to their canonical ones. For instance, although the core games don’t say much about Flareon’s habitat, spinoffs tend to put her in volcanic or lava areas with all the other Fire Pokémon, but if we’re thinking of eeveelutions in terms of being adaptations of Eevee to a specific type of environment, well, Flareon kinda looks to me like a cold-adapted form. Thick fluffy fur is useful in a cold place, and fire powers are useful if most of the other local Pokémon are Ice-types. Alternatively, and this is what I said when I discussed Flareon for my eeveelutions series years ago, I could buy that Flareon belongs in a temperate grassland habitat, using her fire abilities to scorch areas of dry vegetation and drive out prey. Whether Pokémon in general are actually suited to the kinds of biomes the games tend to put them in… is kind of a big and complicated question and not worth getting into at the moment, but I think if you’re going to do it, Eevee is the place to start, because her lore draws attention to the concept of adaptation and (arguably) to the problems with the way Pokémon portrays adaptation.

Which is my long-winded way of saying “this is too damn complicated to get right with a short post that I wrote in like an hour,” but fµ¢& it, let’s give it a whirl Continue reading “Katiecat asks:” →

RandomAccess64 asks:

I personally always liked the fan Pokémon concept of basing a poison/ice type after a cold, with a counterpart poison/fire type after a fever.

And Anonymous asks:

When I think Ice/Poison, my mind first goes to pollution. Some sort of frozen sludge monster, perhaps, or a rotting corpse trapped under a layer of permafrost, its putrescence leaking into the surrounding environment.

Some interesting ideas! The cold/fever one could definitely be played with in some neat ways… maybe as alternate forms of a single Pokémon, even? If it’s a disease-based Pokémon, it might need to spread illnesses in order to keep itself healthy, which could make training one a challenge. The rotting corpse might be pushing it for a Pokémon game – I don’t know if Game Freak would go for that one – but the sludge monster idea sort of makes me want to see a Polar Muk regional variant.

Anonymous asks:

Personally, I do see the Kalos Trio being based off of Norse Mythology, but more generalized, and not drawing inspiration from just the one myth. Like, eagles in general are associated with death in Norse mythology. Not just Hraesvelgr, but other beings such as the God of Death (who turns into an eagle), and the Blood Eagle ritual. (Also, Zygarde is more Jormungand than Nidhogg, with its other two forms likely being based off Fenrir and Hel.) Those are just my thoughts: you’re free to disagree.

Let the disagreement commence. [rolls up sleeves, cracks knuckles]

It is honestly baffling to me that this idea is so widely and unquestioningly accepted, because personally, I don’t think I’ve ever been less convinced by a Pokémon fan theory in my life. I don’t even understand why people look at Yveltal and think “eagle.” The “ruff” around its neck is almost certainly meant to make us think “vulture,” which is a much easier association with death. Stags can be associated with nature without having to bring Norse mythology into it; birds of prey or carrion birds can be associated with death without having to bring Norse mythology into it; insisting that Norse mythology has anything to do with these Pokémon makes the concept weaker and more confusing. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

Quick! Describe a concept for a Ice/Poison type Pokemon!

I feel like this has come up before… yeah, here we go.

I can come up with ideas, they’re just sort of hackneyed, and not really very elegant. The polar regions aren’t known for poisonous or venomous animals in the real world, so there’s not a lot of inspiration that obviously lends itself to Ice/Poison. You kind of wind up producing either a polar animal with venom slapped on it out of nowhere, or a venomous animal with ice powers slapped on it out of nowhere… hmm.

Okay, mild flash of inspiration, maybe something based on a glass frog, with hints of poison dart frog for good measure? See-through skin made of ice, poisonous glands… steps on Toxicroak’s toes a bit, but that’s all right if we make it weird enough… maybe the skin splinters when it’s injured, and the shards inflict poison? Maybe make it a stained-glass frog, with lots of bright colours? But then you’re drifting away from anything that justifies making it an Ice-type… I suppose this is a start, anyway.

Anonymous asks:

Did you see the alleged starter leaks? They’re pretty clearly fake but still cute and whoever made them did a great job of copying Pokemon’s aesthetic.

I have now. I think maybe they feel so much like Pokémon because the pony is very reminiscent of Keldeo, the bear of Solosis, and the coral thing a little bit of Phantump, albeit with a palette swap. The type changes make it hard to put your finger on what feels familiar about them, though. Pretty clever (assuming, of course, that they are fake – and I see no reason to speculate otherwise).

Anonymous asks:

You know what, there’s kind of a missed opportunity with Diancie. Think about it, Diancie is, canonically, a mutated Carbink, yet Carbink is not related to how it’s obtained at all. I mean, how hard would it have been to have an event-distributed item that somehow evolves Carbink into Diancie? We have a Mythical Pokemon that hatches from an egg for pete’s sake, why not have a Mythological Pokemon that evolves from a regular Pokemon?

I can’t speak for Game Freak’s decision-making process, but that direction is obvious enough and uncomplicated enough that I am inclined to think they probably have some reason for not taking it – most likely because Diancie is portrayed (e.g. in the movie in which she stars) as a special Carbink, with powers to which other Carbink cannot aspire. You might liken it to the rarity of a perfect natural diamond – you can cut and polish diamonds to make them nicer, but ultimately there are some flaws and inclusions that will be impossible to remove, and Diancie needs to be a perfect diamond.

Anonymous asks:

If you had to make a generic normal type rodent pokemon (like ratatta and zigzagoon) what kind of thing would you like to make? No cop outs like “I wouldn’t!” or ‘put ratatta in the game!”

I think you could make something interesting with a wombat Pokémon that evolves into one of the big extinct megafauna marsupials, like a diprotodon or a marsupial lion (Australia-inspired region…?). Not actually rodents, of course, but then, most of them aren’t taxonomically rodents (we’ve had mustelids, procyonids, lagomorphs and feliforms), so I’d say we’re probably in the clear on that score. Give ‘em biiiiig fμ¢&-off claws; wombats have nasty claws. I still think we need some additional twist on this to make it a properly fleshed-out Pokémon and not just a cartoon version of a real animal, but it’ll do for a start.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

What would you think of a grass/dragon line that starts as a wisteria, then evolves into a anthropomorphized snapdragon, and its final stage is a titan arum? I even came up with names: Mysteria, Dragunia, and Titatunia. It could be the first non-poison type to have stench as an ability. Grass type seal of approval?

Sounds reasonable to me; probably some good reasons to do over-the-top grotesqueness that might be fun, and lets you do a traditional support-oriented Grass-type with a twist. So sure.

Anonymous asks:

Do you think it’s possible that GF don’t actually WANT to make Pikachu clones every gen, but they’re forced to by, I dunno, Nintendo or some such for marketing’s sake? A bit of Executive Meddling, if you will. Maybe Mimikyu hints at this by poking fun at the needless (and desperate?) attempt to capture Pikachu’s appeal and popularity?

I think if there were a top-down policy on that, we’d probably see more of them in promotional materials than we do, likely at Pikachu’s expense. That, and… well, I don’t know how Nintendo manages its creative teams, but I would have hoped Game Freak had earned a bit of independence by now. I think they do it specifically to annoy me. Having said that, this is an interesting way of looking at Mimikyu; I’ll have to talk about it in my review.

Anonymous asks:

I’ve got a challenge for you, if you have the time! Your hatred for Nosepass and Probopass is legendary around these parts of Tumblr (by which I mean your blog). How then would you ‘fix’ them to make them more interesting to you? So a challenge along the lines of your suggested improvements for the Top Ten Worst Pokémon! (don’t worry, we’ll do good ol’ Garbodor another day)

ohhhhhhhhhh goddddddddd

whyyyyyyyy

Okay, well… part of the problem is, the most interesting thing about Nosepass and Probopass is probably their link to the cardinal directions, but that link goes through the dumbest thing about Nosepass and Probopass – their giant red magnetic noses. Also, it’s just bizarre to have a Pokémon that can only ever face directly north (how do they even fight like that?), and I kind of want some excuse to give them multiple faces, so that they “face” both north and south, or in all four cardinal directions, but then doing that would force us to abandon the cool moai inspiration. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →