Tag: Pokémon

Anonymous asks:

Do you consider bronzong to step on claydol’s toes?

Hmm.  Interesting question.  

They’re definitely very similar aesthetically, as artefact Pokémon with mystical powers that move by levitating and are pretty much inscrutable.  I think there are some important differences, though, particularly Claydol being vaguely humanoid, and Bronzong having a very particular cultural inspiration (Japanese Iron Age ritual bells that were used, among other things, to pray for rain – this is why Bronzong can remember Rain Dance and Sunny Day via Heart Scales).  They’re both very closely tied up with the ancient civilisations of the Pokémon world, but in different ways; Bronzong was actually worshipped for its specific powers, whereas it’s sort of unclear whether Claydol were ever actually alive in ancient times, or just came to life somehow afterwards (perhaps even relatively recently).  You can do very different things with them, I think.

Anonymous asks:

Couldn’t gamefreak have simply taken volbeat/ilumise and plusle/minun and mashed them into a single pair of designs? They would have then had a pair of firefly pokemon with a relatively exclusive type combination, unique breeding mechanics, and a whole teamwork thing going on, backed up by the plus/minus thing. This would have been objectively interesting, and also not have ripped off pikachu.

And make ‘em Bug/Electric, you mean?  Hmm.  Yeah, I think quite like that, actually.  The cliché that “opposites attract” would tie Volbeat and Illumise’s romance theme together with their new Electricity powers quite nicely.  I think the problem is that Game Freak considered ripping off Pikachu to be a virtue of Plusle and Minun rather than a fault.  Which… y’know, is not really a position I can understand, but clearly it’s important to them since they keep bloody doing it.

Anonymous asks:

Do you have any Pokémon fan theories you are particularly fond of? If so, what are some of them? Would love to hear what theories a Pokémaniac such as yourself find intriguing! 😀

Other than my own? 😉 Heh.  No, that’s a joke; mine are a load of nonsense (just browse for a while, especially the anime commentaries).  But yeah, I don’t know… I don’t really go out of my way to look for these, and my reaction to a lot of them is “well, sure, if you like?”  I’m quite fond of the whole Venonat/Butterfree mix-up thing, purely because I think it’s one of the few bits of wild internet speculation that might actually be true.  Beyond that, though, mostly I just really enjoy the thought processes that go into some of the really dark interpretations of little details of the game, like the story that got built up around Blue’s Raticate dying on the S.S. Anne.  It’s going way further than I think you can take the creators’ intentions, but it’s interesting enough in its own right to be a lot of fun.

vikingboybilly asks:

So there’s debate over what makes a pokémon a dragon type, or a fairy type, or even a normal type, but I’m wondering what GameFreak thinks constitutes a bug-type. At first it seems obvious, but there are anomalous outliers like anorith being bug while kabuto, krabby and corphish are not. Shuckle is a worm; I don’t think of a worm as being a bug. Skorupi loses it’s bug typing for Dark, and if a bug has a secondary typing and grows wings when it evolves, it won’t be a FLYING type.

Well, Shuckle’s not a worm; it’s labelled the “mould Pokémon” so I think it’s probably meant to be more like a slime mould, but that’s hardly a “bug” either.  I’m not sure that I have a good answer for this one.  I think probably their ideas of what “Bug-type” means are more aesthetic than biological.  Crustaceans aren’t Bug-types because they more clearly “belong” in Water.  Anorith not being Water is really odd, because the way Armaldo is portrayed, as one of the first living things to move onto land, seems like it should give a good reason for Anorith to change from Rock/Water to Rock/Bug when it evolves; I think they may have wanted to avoid Rock/Water for the second set of fossil Pokémon, though, since Kabuto and Omanyte had both been Rock/Water.  So I suppose what it seems to be, to me, is “arthropods that don’t obviously belong somewhere else,” with one or two odd extras like Shuckle, who certainly doesn’t seem to belong elsewhere either… Grass, maybe?