Anonymous asks:

What do you think the in-universe justification for the national pokedex is? like why is kanto first, then johto, and so on. Is it because Oak created the pokedexes?

I think maybe the better question is “why is there an order at all?”

They’re not physical books; they don’t need to be printed, so there’s no need for the entries to actually exist in any sort of canonical order. The user can just ask for one specific entry, or for a list of entries arranged alphabetically, or by type, or by geographical distribution, or whatever. In-universe there is no obvious reason why, for instance, the Pidgey line should come immediately after the Weedle line. And then, of course, the one clear ordering principle – the fact that evolutionary families go together – is then violated apparently at random (again, from an in-universe perspective) by Pokémon like Pichu or Kingdra.

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thephilosophicalsheep asks:

War has been a concept alluded to several times in the pokemon games, but has never outright happened. What would you think of a pokemon game in which the whole premise was that a war has started to break out, and your job was to stop it? War in the pokemon world sounds like an interesting concept, and using pokemon as tools of destruction could eventually be shown to be an unspeakable sin.

Well, we do have Conquest, don’t we? That’s not really what you’re asking, but I think that would be Game Freak’s answer, that they don’t want that kind of theme in the core series; Pokémon’s preferred tone is a good deal more optimistic than that, and in fact even in Conquest war is pretty seriously declawed, from what I’ve seen of it. Which is the problem, of course; Pokémon’s been around so long that you have people like me who’ve grown up with it, and wish it could have grown up bit more with us, and think that something exploring themes like that would be really interesting, but then you also have Game Freak, for whom Pokémon is (I think) a vision of what they wish our world could be like. Evil exists, but it can always be overcome; people get hurt, but they can always be healed.

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vikingboybilly asks:

So… ghost types. It’s pretty well implied that ghost pokémon are spirits of the deceased, but you can breed them… and hatch ghost pokémon from eggs. Does something have to die somewhere for the egg to be laid? Or do they just… procreate new spirits, who may eventually incarnate a living being? (you can breed yamask, btw) Shedinja is handled well; it’s a shed skin with sentience. Froslass, though… fact: Gengar is white on the original red/blue box art.

…is it? I mean, very clearly they have an affinity for death, the dead, and places of spiritual power, but if anything I’d say that they are implied to be very much not what everyone thinks they are.

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Anonymous asks:

On your entry about Goodra you got a comment from someone who (rather crudely) claimed that male Goodra were worthless. I first looked at this comment and thought it was rather stupid… but it isn’t. A female doesn’t need a male of the same species to reproduce. In Goodra’s case any Dragon egg group Pokemon will work. Surely this puts the species with a larger percentage of females at a massive advantage? And for that matter how do you think male species like Tauros can exist at all?

Just so that no one is in any danger of taking it seriously, I will quote here the comment that we are currently referring to:
“Goodra is a girl. She cannot be male.It’s nice to see you agree. There’s a place called 4chan who is in denial about it. They constantly say that Goodra can be male, but it’s obvious she can’t. As for me, I’ll keep reminding them that she is indeed of the female gender only. I hate male Goodra to the point where I spam on 4chan about how horrible it is. I hate it with a fiery passion that nobody could ever match. As for the female, It’s just that in reverse. I love her with an angelic passion that nobody could ever match. Nobody likes male ones. They’re treated like pigs because that’s really what they are. Whatever you do, never refer to Goodra with anything other than female pronouns. OP, you focused very heavily on using femnouns and I salute you for it.”

…quite.

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Anonymous asks:

Ever read The Food Politics of Pokémon on Modern Farmer? It’s a short read, and I’m sure it’s nothing incredibly insightful to a Pokémaniac of your caliber, but still, I’m interested in hearing what you think especially with regards to your own Pokémon and Food article! Awesome blog, btw! 🙂

The whole Pokémon as food thing is really interesting because it seems like something they’ve gotten progressively more uncomfortable with since the series started. Like, there’s plenty of evidence in the first couple of generations that humans eat Pokémon (e.g. Farfetch’d) and that Pokémon eat each other (e.g. Magikarp and Pidgeotto). The recent stuff tends to involve ingredients that you could hypothetically take from a Pokémon without killing or even necessarily hurting them – for example, that article mentions Restaurant le Yeah’s blue cheese curdled with Arbok venom, which you could harvest in a perfectly humane fashion, and it’s been well established for years that Slowpoke are largely numb to pain and their tails grow back very quickly. When you actually sit across from someone senior in Game Freak and ask them “well, do we eat Pokémon,” as happened here, for instance, Junichi Masuda gives you this incredibly vague response:

“There’s a lot of fruits and vegetables in the world of Pokémon. There is also a variety of snacks and various candies and whatnot that come from the different regions. The Pokémon world is much more technologically advanced than the world of our own, so perhaps there is probably a lot of different food that we can’t even think of.”

Like… he doesn’t quite want to say “no” outright, but he’s also clearly very uncomfortable with the idea. And at this point you get into “death of the author,” where it doesn’t actually matter what the creators think, because the world they’ve presented to us is one in which it makes sense if people do eat Pokémon, and we are free to interpret it that way if the games and anime don’t actually contradict it. But yeah, it is awkward, ethically, and it is prone to cultural values dissonance, because which animals are okay to eat is not by any means universal in the real world – like, if you’re in India, cows are off limits; in most of the English-speaking world, eating dogs and cats is frowned upon; the Japanese, despite international condemnation of their Antarctic “research” expeditions, are happy to scoff down whales, which are among the most intelligent non-human animals on the planet; no one has any problem eating birds but for some reason the “West” is really uncomfortable with insects. So I see no reason to imagine that this kind of thing wouldn’t be just as contested, if not more so, in the Pokémon world.

EDIT: And for that matter, Masuda references the variety of fruits and vegetables in the Pokémon world, but some of those are also Pokémon; do they have weight?

Anonymous asks:

Would you think that horror movies in the Pokemon world would be incredibly lame?

I’m not really into horror so I don’t think I’m the best person to comment on what makes a horror movie lame, but… no? I don’t think so, anyway? Horror is fundamentally about the unknown, I think, and there’s a lot of potentially dangerous mystery in the Pokémon world. The reality often turns out to be perfectly benign on close inspection – just like in the real world – but I don’t see any reason they couldn’t manipulate fear of the unknown in exactly the same way as we do.

vikingboybilly asks:

If Unova is supposed to be New York, how does stuff like the dragon spiral tower and those extremely egyptian-like ruins make any sense? The native Americans (or pre-columbian migrants, whatever) in the northeast didn’t make stuff like that as far as I know. Doesn’t this annoy you as a RUIN MANIAC?

Well, it’s not “supposed to be New York.” It’s supposed to be the same physical shape as New York, and New York’s cosmopolitan character is supposed to influence the way we think and feel about Unova, but it’s a stretch to say that every feature of Unova, or even most of them, should map to something in the real city – especially given that New York is, y’know, a city, and Unova is a whole region. I mean, Johto is loosely based on the Kansai region, but I defy you to find the real world equivalent to the Ruins of Alph; Hoenn is Kyushu, rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, but it has a big honking desert in the middle of it for some reason; the Parfum Palace in Kalos is clearly the Chateau de Versailles, but it’s just as clearly in the wrong place. I think it’s reasonable to say that Castelia City is supposed to feel like Manhattan, but beyond that… meh?

Anonymous asks:

Explain Diglett’s Cave to me.

Well, it’s… a cave. There are Diglett and Dugtrio in it. I think it’s at least implied (or possibly stated somewhere; I don’t remember) that they dug the cave, and it’s not entirely clear why they might have done that. The anime portrays Diglett as being surprisingly organised, and having a long-term plan for managing the landscape in order to maintain and enhance the habitats of other species of Pokémon, so I’m prepared to believe that they could have coordinated on that scale, but I’m lost on why. It could have been part of an agreement with ancient humans, considering that Pokémon other than Diglett don’t seem to use it.

Anonymous asks:

It’s been implied in certain Pokedex entries that only a select few Pokemon are actually capable of understanding human speech. If this is true, how is it that all Pokemon are able to understand the commands for each their attacks right after being captured, with no training whatsoever?

Difficult to explain, but I suspect they understand the intent behind words, as expressed through a combination of tone and body language, to a degree that is unusual for humans. They may not know, right off the bat, exactly what words mean, but they can tell instinctively whether the tone of a command is aggressive, or cautious, or desperate, and they can tell the difference between being told to use a regular technique and being told to do the most powerful, dramatic attack in their arsenal. The first couple of battles will often be rocky; that’s part of what characters in the anime mean when they talk about having to learn to work in unison with your Pokémon, and it’s part of why empathy is so often stressed as a vital quality for a Pokémon trainer. You don’t see this in the games, of course, but, well, would you like to? It would just be a pain.

viridian kingof kanto asks:

In XY the Gym Leaders and Elite Four all held titles of nobility which increased (the Champion as Grand Duchess and GLs as Marques). But you yourself are also able to climb the social ladder and gain titles. What do you think that meansforthesociety?

Well… to be perfectly honest I think it means that the noble titles are really not very important in modern Kalos. They’re an anachronistic remnant of what I think may once have been a Pokémon-training aristocracy that ruled Kalos in a period when not everyone could train and battle with Pokémon, probably before the invention of mass-produced Pokéballs. At one point, membership in the nobility made it possible for people to become trainers. Today, anyone can be a trainer, and being good at it can get you into the nobility – but since it’s no longer exclusive, the nobility can’t really act as a cohesive group with distinct goals and values anymore. Its political power has been supplanted by modern democracies, and its central position in the institution of Pokémon training has been supplanted by the Pokémon League. All that’s left is ceremonial.