Tag: QandA

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:

Would you like to see a Mega Vileplume?

Yes and no… I mean, Vileplume is my favourite Pokémon so, like, if you want to give her cool stuff, go right ahead, but I don’t know if the pile of extra stats associated with mega evolution necessarily solves the problems that she has.  With the exception of Slowbro, Sableye and Aggron, most top-tier mega Pokémon are offensive powerhouses, and that’s not really what Vileplume is trying to do anyway.  I think her real problem is that her hidden ability (Effect Spore) is just bloody useless, and her regular ability (Chlorophyll) is amazing but completely mismatched to her role.  You could use mega evolution to cheat in a replacement ability, I suppose, but honestly I would much rather just add a second regular ability; most Pokémon have two, and giving Vileplume something a) really strong and b) different from what other Grass-type supporters have would, I think, just about do it.

Anonymous asks:

How would you make a Mega Luxray. Like stat changes, extra moves for Luxray next generation, ability change, type change, etc.

I’ve also received this question:
“How would you feel about a Mega Luxray that was an Electric/Dark type with Strong Jaw as an ability? To fit in with its ability, give it Poison Fang through breeding or move tutor, and Volt Tackle because there’s no reason for it to not have Volt Tackle. Then for its stats, lower its Special Attack and pour most of the stats into Attack with some going into Speed.”

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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:

I know Pokémon’s weaknesses, resistances, and immunities don’t always make sense, but what do you think is the deal with 1) Normal being immune to Ghost but Fighting isn’t, and 2) Steel being immune to Poison and Rock and/or Ground aren’t?

I think the Normal immunity to Ghost attacks comes from a sort of obliviousness to the paranormal.  Ghosts and spirits have no hold over you if you don’t believe they can harm you, and Normal Pokémon are just too normal, too mundane, too out of touch with the supernatural, to know that they should even be scared.  Steel and Poison… well, Rock and Ground do resist Poison attacks, despite not actually being immune to Poison attacks or the poison status, so I think we probably shouldn’t read too much into it.  However, I suppose I would say that what I think they’re implying here is that Steel-types are more divorced from normal Pokémon biology than Rock-types are; Rock Pokémon have layers of anatomy that are in some sense “normal” underneath their silica-based shells, but the bodies of Steel Pokémon are radically different through-and-through at the level of their biochemistry, which makes them invulnerable to ordinary poisons.

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.