That seems unavoidable to me.  Some Pokémon are very used to teamwork and cooperation in nature, like Mightyena or Beedrill.  Taking orders in service to a larger goal just makes sense to them.  Other Pokémon are inherently very individualistic, like Charizard, or used to manipulating others, like Malamar.  That doesn’t necessarily mean they dislike humans, but they might be more likely to come to that relationship from the perspective that they know better than you do, or be more concerned with making sure they’re getting something specific in return for their help.

Oh, do I have to?

Fiiiine.  But be warned; marking university students’ essays is actually part of what I do for a living, so I’m not going easy on him.

… (here it is, by the way)

Well, the prose could certainly stand a fair bit of polishing, and if I were marking this essay for a class then I would probably scribble “reference?” in the margins next to a couple of sentences, but I like the point of it.  It’s not often you see people actually put up an internally consistent definition of slavery based on primary sources before assigning the label to Pokémon training.  It’s very easy to demonise Pokémon by saying “look, slavery” but most of the worst things associated with slavery in the mind of a non-specialist don’t apply to Pokémon training at all – and, in fact, calling it that trivialises actual slavery, which is still very much a thing in some parts of the world.

Having said that, I think that he actually concedes a few points to which you can come up with objections, and that there are in turn obvious parries to his own arguments which remain unaddressed (although in fairness this is rather a short essay to deal with such a difficult topic).  In particular one of my principle reasons for rejecting the ‘slavery’ thing has always been that I actually believe capture is consensual – partly because that’s just the way the anime presents it much of the time (the battle is about winning respect, not rendering the Pokémon unable to resist), partly because it very neatly explains why unconscious Pokémon can never be captured (something which is otherwise difficult to deal with convincingly), partly because the characters consistently treat physically restraining or abducting a Pokémon as being completely different to capturing it in a Pokéball from a moral standpoint (the former is unequivocally not okay).

Some people actually do object to pet ownership on moral grounds, and in particular the statements that pets “do not display levels of intelligence and self awareness” and that these are “defining traits of humanity” are actually not self-evident or uncontested.  I can certainly understand refraining from discussion in a piece of this length, but I would want one of my students to footnote that.

There’s an odd paragraph in there where he talks about using one Pokémon to catch another, and about the respect accorded to the Professors who initiate new trainers; he seems to be bringing these up as a point of similarity between Pokémon training and either slavery or pet ownership, but he doesn’t actually explain what the link is (his definition of slavery didn’t say anything about the acceptance of the practice in wider society, so it’s difficult to see how it’s supposed to fit into the overall argument).  You can extrapolate what he seems to be getting at in this part, but you shouldn’t have to; the argument should stand on its own.

Ash cares deeply for his Pokémon; this is beyond contestation to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the anime, and it’s a perfectly fair point, and an important one – to which the perfectly fair and important answer, I think, is that Ash himself is indoctrinated in the system.  The kid’s supposed to be ten, for heaven’s sake; he may have (in fact, it’s Ash; he almost certainly has) a very limited grasp of the history and ethics of Pokémon training.  He wants the best for his Pokémon, beyond a doubt, but we really have to question whether he’s the best judge of what that is, or fully understands the impact his lifestyle has on his companions.  Ash himself isn’t naturally inclined to spend a lot of time on these questions (although, to his credit, he does recognise when he’s made a mistake), because he’s grown up believing that he has that right, and his society supports him in that belief.  He’s a good kid – it’s hard to deny that – but these are questions about the society Ash lives in, not Ash himself.

By the same token, Ash’s apology to Butterfree for the ill-considered trade and obvious remorse over that doesn’t change the fact that he was able to do it in the first place.  The conspicuous benevolence of the way the system seems to operate shouldn’t conceal the very real inequality in the power dynamic here, because to my mind that’s actually part of what makes the relationship so interesting.  Pokémon give up a lot to travel with humans, and although I continue to believe that they can abandon their trainers if they choose, that’s not always going to be an easy or practical option for them if they’ve travelled far from any suitable habitat.  Meanwhile, humans can give up their Pokémon with very little difficulty, and may even receive a new one more to their tastes in return.  Bear in mind that the Gentleman seems to have given up his Raticate with as little consideration as Ash gave up Butterfree, and with none of Ash’s remorse – the tone of the episode makes it obvious who we’re supposed to empathise with, but both exist.

Desiring the happiness of one’s slaves is not incompatible with the idea of slavery or ownership of another being – for me, as a classicist, what comes to mind is the Roman philosopher Seneca, who (like all wealthy Romans) owned numerous slaves.  He never argued for an end to slavery (I, at least, don’t think any such idea would have been conceivable to him, though that’s certainly debatable and I don’t know Seneca as well as perhaps I should), but he does speak at some length about treating them well, because he believes we should value people according to their moral fibre and not their social standing, and in fact argues that (say) an alcoholic or an adulterer is even lower than a slave because these people choose slavery for themselves (Seneca’s particular brand of Stoicism basically teaches, among other things, that we are all slaves to the circumstances of our own lives, which is an… interesting perspective, when you look at the circumstances of his life and his complicity in the Imperial administration of Nero, but let’s not go there today).  So, yeah – you can wholeheartedly commit to the idea of owning people while still making an effort to treat them kindly (although it bears mentioning that Seneca is, by his own admission, not really representative of his culture, class or era, and that his portrayal of his own relationship with his slaves could easily be distorted – we lack any testimony of the slaves themselves).  The legality of a slave’s status and the emotional nature of a slave’s relationship with his or her master do not necessarily go hand in hand – although personally, I think a society where such benevolent master/slave relationships were the norm rather than the exception would be so unusual that we might have trouble recognising it as slavery.  Having said all that, this is a very American debate, and in conversations with Americans ‘slavery’ tends to mean the slavery of the Antebellum South, which is not a period I know well (whereas, in conversations with me, ‘slavery’ tends to mean the slavery of the Classical Mediterranean – regular readers may have noticed that this is a theme), so perhaps it’s better to let this slide.

So… yeah.  I don’t think I would call it a terribly original piece, and the arguments themselves are fairly superficial and miss a few things that I, at least, think are important (make of that what you will), but he’s done his homework, all right.  I know I’ve never gone to the effort of presenting a formal definition of slavery for talking about this stuff, which is an important step.  B/B+.

It’s sort of nothing we haven’t talked about before.  Honestly, this kind of piece annoys me a little bit – pointing out that Pokémon can be read as apologetic of animal abuse isn’t at all original or even particularly clever, and I honestly don’t think it deserves a great deal of attention.  It only becomes interesting if you use it to tell a story, and in that respect the way this article is written really confuses me – it seems pretty clear when he talks about Pikachu in Yellow that he’s discussing Pokémon from an out-of-universe perspective, but much of the rest of it, particularly that very last paragraph, is more in the style of a political pamphlet written from the perspective of a character in the Pokémon world.  I’m left wondering what the point is.

I think what really jumps out at me is that he gives the FBI estimate for the number of hostages who develop Stockholm Syndrome, which is 8%, then doesn’t really explain the fact that, by all accounts, the figure for Pokémon seems more like 90%, if not higher.  I think there’s sort of a vague allusion in that paragraph to the idea that humans in the Pokémon world are just very good at it, but I feel like 8% is just not a high enough success rate to allow the phenomenon to explain what we actually see (and, in fact, since Stockholm Syndrome seems to have something to do with developing empathy for one’s captor, I’d expect it to have, if anything, an even lower rate of incidence for cross-species interactions).  Reliance on Stockholm Syndrome as we understand it should make training completely unviable for the majority of Pokémon.  I’m pretty sure that’s not all that’s going on.

…when did I become the guy the internet asks about this kind of $#!t?  I am seriously questioning the life choices that have brought me to this point.

You know, I have absolutely no idea.  Should probably start with reference to this: http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/74976019208/your-latest-answer-especially-by-your-last-sentence
Anyway… well, Attract is limited by gender, but not by reproductive compatibility, which suggests that it is capable of affecting Pokémon, who, under normal circumstances, would never find the user… well, ‘attractive’ (since, in most individuals of most species, attractiveness is based on a subjective judgement of suitability as a mate).  That being the case, it’s not immediately obvious how the technique actually works, though it seems like it must primarily involve emotional manipulation and romantic infatuation rather than straightforward sexual attraction or arousal (which in any case could get… problematic… if a smaller and physically weaker Pokémon used Attract on a much more powerful one… let’s not think about that for too long).  Pokémon in the anime under the effects of Attract tend to be portrayed as highly irrational and motivated primarily by a desire to please the user of the technique and win his or her approval and admiration, irrespective of how courtship actually works in the target’s species.  All the move’s flavour implies a romantic dimension to the effect, but it seems like a fairly superficial one.  I suppose what it seems to do is cause the target to see the user as a perfect specimen of the opposite gender, so exquisite that normal courtship behaviour seems utterly futile in the presence of such a paragon, causing the target to resort to uncharacteristic and generally ineffectual attempts to win the user’s affection through ingratiating flattery and self-abasement.

As for what it would do to a human… I suppose it depends largely on what you understand Pokémon ‘gender’ to mean, which is something I’ve tried very hard in the past to make as complicated as possible.  If Pokémon ‘gender’ and human ‘gender’ work on basically the same principles, then I suppose it could bring about the same irrational desire to win that Pokémon’s admiration.  If the human is a trainer, they might become obsessed with convincing the Pokémon to join their team.  If, on the other hand, Pokémon gender is something completely alien to us, as I suggested in that tract of rambling nonsense, it could very easily do nothing whatsoever.

If you’re wondering whether it would evoke… inappropriate thoughts… well, I think that’s probably best left to writers of a certain kind of fan fiction, don’t you?

You know, I actually have a pet idea about this that I’ve been nursing for a while.

The first Pokéballs were made from Apricorns, yeah?  This is apparently a traditional art that goes back several generations, maybe centuries.  Certainly mass-produced Pokéballs are relatively recent – they’ve come about only in Drayden’s lifetime – and reliant on advanced technology (which is unlikely ever to be explained).  So what makes the first Pokéballs work?  ’Mysterious energy’ seems like it would be the default cop-out answer.  The thing is… an Apricorn is a berry.  And we already know a way to draw out the ‘mysterious energy’ of a berry: the Natural Gift attack.    There’s no data in the game for what happens when you use Natural Gift with an Apricorn, but it stands to reason that it would do something – given what we know about Apricorns, could that something be dematerialising a Pokémon temporarily?  Of course, berries aren’t particularly robust – imagine trying to hold a Pokémon in swirly-energy-thingy form inside a great big acorn.  Unless they’ve been specially prepared and reinforced by a craftsman like Kurt, they probably wear out very quickly and have to be replaced every few weeks.  So yeah, not by Pokémon necessarily, but I think the first Pokéballs were almost certainly created by a co-operative effort.

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking, but basically this all hinges on what is apparently one of my more controversial beliefs – namely that Pokémon choose to be captured.  Here’s the short version.  We know that you need to weaken a Pokémon to catch it, but also that if you actually knock it out, you can’t catch it – it needs to be conscious (which to me suggests that we’re looking for consent).  We see in the anime that there is a tendency to portray battles with wild Pokémon as a process of earning their respect, and this becomes more pronounced as the series progresses.  We know that Team Rocket and other villains capture Pokémon both traditionally, using Pokéballs, and with a variety of other contrivances (nets, pits, machines, etc) – the latter is regarded as a heinous crime, even when their targets are wild; the former is apparently totally fine.  We know that Pokémon can actually leave their Pokéballs without being ordered.  We know that villains use cages to restrain Pokémon, which would be an expensive and illogical waste of space if Pokéballs were capable of doing the same job.  Honestly it seems to me like the creators have actually built in a lot of reasons for us to think that Pokémon have a choice in all this.

Also, just putting it out there, Stockholm Syndrome isn’t magic.  It doesn’t automatically happen to everyone who experiences a kidnapping or hostage situation.  I don’t think you can realistically build an entire civilisation on it, especially when the ‘captives’ are vastly more powerful, physically, than the ‘captors’ and in many cases at least as intelligent.

All of the above?

It’s sort of like asking “what do you think of cities?” or “what do you think of the ocean?”  If you can give a simple answer, you probably don’t understand it very well.  I mean, what can you say, ‘overall,’ about a concept that expresses the relationships between Ash and Pikachu, between Misty and Psyduck, between AZ and Floette, between Silver and his starter (whichever one it was), between the Gardevoir and the Gengar from Mystery Dungeon, and between Giovanni and Meowth?  It’s all of those things and more, to different people and different Pokémon, in different places and at different times.  Sometimes, maybe even a lot of the time, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but it’s also so utterly fundamental to the way the Pokémon world works that nothing else functions anymore without it.  It’s life.