Anonymous asks:

The more recent Pokemon games imply that Gym Leaders adjust their strength and difficulty based on the challenger so that its not a complete stomp in either direction what are your thoughts on this?

That it’s really the only way the Gym system can make any damn sense.

Think about it; not all trainers start their journeys in Pallet Town (or New Bark Town, or wherever), and not all of them will follow the same routes as we do through their home regions – not least because our routes are often determined by unusual temporary obstacles; if that Sudowudo hadn’t been standing in that exact spot, it would have made perfect sense for a trainer starting in Violet City to earn their second badge in Ecruteak City. Gym Leaders are supposed to be educators as much as they are obstacles; they want trainers to learn stuff, not get curb stomped three weeks into their journeys, give up, and go home.

Anonymous asks:

What do you make of the weight of various Pokemon. For example, why does something like Beautifly weigh as much as a young child, while giants such as Primal Groudon weigh only about a ton. (Primal Groudon seems especially weird in that its almost fifty percent larger than its normal form, but only weighs about one hundred pounds more. Primal Kyogre is even more bizarre.). This seems to be a trend among Pokemon, with small species being super dense, while big ones are ultra light, like Wailord.

This has always bothered me, but upon looking into it, I think many of them actually hold up quite well. In some cases part of the difficulty is that it’s not always clear what a Pokémon’s listed “height” actually means – like, if Beautifly’s body is one metre long from head to toe (does… does Beautifly have toes…? Bah; whatever) then I could easily see her weighing 28kg; if 1m is, say, from the tips of her antennae to the ‘tails’ of her wings, or maybe even a 1m wingspan, then it becomes a lot harder to swallow. In general I’m mostly fine with the weights of small Pokémon.

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Anonymous asks:

Would you say that in the Pokemon world, rather than Pokemon being named after human words, Pokemon names are onomatopoeia derived from Pokemon-speak, and the human words that sound similar come from those Pokemon names?

Yeeeeeeessss?

By which I mean that it makes sense and it seems more likely than not that something like this is going on, but at the same time I’m concerned I’ve never thought through the implications of that possibility in sufficient detail. If you see what I mean. Because it’s a nice way of making sense of what we actually see – that is, a world where all the animals neatly and politely know how to say their own names, but nothing else. And on a certain level it makes a lot of intuitive sense. When you have a very basic writing system, you write the word for ‘horse’ by drawing a picture of a horse, and maybe later on the “horse” symbol becomes the symbol for “h” once you start wanting to write things that can’t easily be represented pictographically. When you’re just grappling with the rudiments of language, well, what do you call the animal that makes the sound “pi-ka-chu”? A “pi-ka-chu-animal,” obviously. And maybe then from there you start to take words for other things from those names for your animals, like, what do you call this pointy stick that you made for hunting? Well, you name it after the pointy bird that hunts things, obviously. Consider also the fact that the Latin alphabet, in the Pokémon world, is explicitly supposed to have been borrowed from the Unown, and it makes perfect sense that elements of spoken language might have been taken over in the same way.

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Anonymous asks:

I dunno if this has been asked, but I wondered if you think there are any parallels between a Pokemon journey and a religious pilgrimage?

Well, I suppose you do travel to a number of specific sites in order to become a better person… I don’t know if I think it’s a particularly useful metaphor for the way modern Pokémon journeys are portrayed in the games and anime, because it tends to be seen as more a “coming of age” thing than a “spiritual enlightenment” thing, so actually a better analogy might be the classic American road trip… which would make a damn good live action Pokémon movie, I think. We could, perhaps, speculate that the modern Pokémon journey is based on some traditional activity with much greater spiritual significance – replace the gyms with monasteries, for instance (and some gyms may not have changed much since then, like Fuchsia and Ecruteak) – but that would be pure speculation.

Anonymous asks:

Why do you think there haven’t been any Gym Leaders who specialize in the Dark-type, despite there being multiple Elite Four Dark-type specialists?

Difficult to say. In Gold and Silver it was likely because there were so few Dark Pokémon and all of them except for Umbreon were very late-game, but that excuse is really gone by the third generation. I suppose you could suggest that, because Dark is the ‘evil’ type and Dark techniques focus on, basically, fighting dirty, while Gym Leaders are supposed to be educators and pillars of the community, they just don’t want Gym Leaders who focus on Dark-types; they want trainers to have more experience before they start playing around with that stuff. But that’s just me making stuff up; I don’t have any particular support for that interpretation.

Anonymous asks:

Do you think there are any similarities between the creations of Pokémon like Claydol and Golett, and Pokémon like Porygon? To me the former always seem to have been created by, I dunno, psychic Pokémagic and the latter via science/technology… but then Golett’s Pokédex entry states it was created by “ancient science” and, come to think of it, does magic even exist in the Pokémon world? And what about Castform? Do you think creating a Pokémon is a long-standing tradition in the Pokémon world?

Mmm, but what is technology and what is magic? If the forces we call ‘magic’ work according to rules that are observable and knowable, then magic can be approached scientifically, and one’s knowledge of how to use it is a form of technology, in exactly the same way as our knowledge of how to extract electrical energy from the wind and tides is “technology.” If ghosts, spirits, psychic powers and souls are real things in the Pokémon world, and can have tangible effects on the physical universe, then you can observe them, formulate scientific theories about them, and create technology that interacts with them. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” says Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum, or to put it another way, ‘magic’ is what we call technology we don’t understand, and I suspect the writers behind Pokémon would incline to a similar idea if you were to press them. “Ancient science” here perhaps means that the people who created Golett knew how to construct vessels that could contain a soul after death and allow it to interact more easily with the physical world, and to me that’s a sort of technology – just one that’s wholly beyond the Pokémon world’s modern civilisations. When they talk about creating Pokémon, they tend to see it as something new, experimental, something they’re just playing with in its earliest stages, but maybe some of those experiments were inspired by ancient stories, and pushed forward by scientists who had exactly this kind of opinion about ‘magic.’

Onethousandrbirds asks:

if you could rewrite or redirect the plot of any of the games (main series or spin-off) which would you pick?

Hmm… until last year I would have said Emerald, but Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby did a pretty solid job of that with Delta Episode, I think. Black and White are tempting because I think a more nuanced way of looking at their central conflict could have resulted in something absolutely amazing, but the fact is, their story is really good as it stands. I’d probably go with Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, because their flippancy with the whole cosmology has never sat well with me – call me crazy, but I think if you’re going to give the player control of Pokémon that are capable of literally unmaking the universe, you need to be just a little bit more explicit than they were about why that is okay.

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Anonymous asks:

Would you rather be a Pokemon trainer or a Pokemon ranger?

Well, to be perfectly honest I don’t think I have the constitution or physical stamina for the kind of $#!t Pokémon rangers get up to. Trainer can be a hobby, while ranger is a job, and an extremely demanding one at that. In terms of the relationship the two groups have with their Pokémon, though, there’s actually a lot about the rangers’ way of doing things that appeals to me – like the stress on the more temporary, favour-for-a-favour nature of their relationships with most Pokémon, and the resulting emphasis on the more personal ties they have with just one partner. I think the rangers’ training style gets around a lot of the more ethically blurry stuff about living with Pokémon, which is probably a good thing. It also helps that they have a formalised code of ethics about how to treat Pokémon, but that’s more to do with them being all members of a centralised organisation with a definite purpose.

Anonymous asks:

What happens if a pokeball is destroyed having a pokemon inside?

I imagine the Pokémon would simply pop out. There is one episode, Pokémon Food Fight, in which Ash breaks his Snorlax’s Pokéball by dropping it on a rock – the ball isn’t destroyed, but it does stop working. Snorlax immediately comes out. In general Pokémon seem to maintain some degree of awareness while inside a Pokéball and can emerge on their own if they particularly want to, so I suspect that, whatever weird energy state they’re in while inside a ball, it’s not particularly stable, and has to be maintained by the ball’s mechanisms to keep them from just immediately returning to physical form.

ThatsWhatEllieSaid asks:

How do you think the government functions in the pokemon universe? I don’t think there’s ever been any reference to any higher powers in either the games or the anime.

Well, Ash and his friends do occasionally encounter local government, in the form of the mayors of a few of the towns they visit. The mayor of Trovitopolis, in the Orange Islands, is preoccupied with reelection when they meet him in The Mystery Menace, which implies that this particular city’s government is democratic, and in the absence of any further information I would assume that this is true across the board. To be honest, I think this is one case where, if they don’t tell us anything, it’s probably because they just assume it works the same way as it does in the real world.

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