Anonymous asks:

Reaction to Magiana?

Certainly very curious… presumably she’s the vanguard of generation VII, and of course that’s exciting, but the really interesting part is that this is a legendary Pokémon who was explicitly built by humans – and not thousands of years ago by mysterious forgotten magic like Golurk, nor genetically engineered from an existing template like Mewtwo, but in the 16th century with mechanics and clockwork, with the same kind of principles that modern engineering still functions on. I think there’s a lot Magearna might tell us about the history of Pokémon training, and how it changed at the dawn of the modern world. What really catches my eye is that she seems to have Pokéball emblems built into her design, and given that Pokéballs as we know them are supposed to be quite recent inventions, that makes me wonder what the connection is. Did the symbol mean something different five hundred years ago, or was the design of the first Pokéballs based on Magearna’s body?

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:

What would happen if you threw a pokemon at a pokeball?

…why would you…? How…? What?

I mean… I guess the same thing as would happen normally. Right? Unless you have to, like… arm the Pokéball first somehow, like it doesn’t work unless you hit the button before you throw it. I don’t know. But… why?

And if you answer “for science” then so help me I will throw you at a Pokéball!

Anonymous asks:

What’s one event in the pokemon anime that you would change if you could?

Tricky… I think anything I would want to change about the anime would involve more sweeping changes of style or worldbuilding, stuff that you can’t really get rid of by changing a single event. I mean, there are things that annoy me – like Primeape leaving Ash in the way and at the time that he did, I think was really rather misplayed – but I don’t know if any of those are worth the kind of “if you could change one thing” idea that you’re getting at. I suppose more than anything else I would want (if it counts as just “one event”) to fix the cutting off of the GS Ball storyarc, which at the time seemed like it would be really important but ultimately was just forgotten after Ash left the ball with Kurt. I’m just not sure what I would necessarily do with it…

Anonymous asks:

I agree completely with you! Grass types pokemon have many flaws. Grass was, Is and will always be my favorite. But now for the question, Have you noticed that almos all grass starters have a more passive role than the water and fire ones? They always get a narrower offensive movepool, worse offensive stats than the other ones (Sceptile and Torterra are exceptions and maybe Chesnaught) and have a lower stat total than the other starters? (Sceptile is an exception) Do you think it will change?

Well, I don’t know if you can say “almost all” when three out of the six are exceptions, and the stat totals don’t mean a whole lot (sure, Torterra, Venusaur and Meganium have the lowest base stat totals of any starter Pokémon, but they’re only ten points below Swampert, who’s the highest – it doesn’t actually matter). Venusaur, Serperior and Chesnaught are great Pokémon, and Grass may be the only starter type that hasn’t yet produced anything completely broken (I’m looking at you, Speed Boost Blaziken and Protean Greninja), but is that a bad thing? I think the main problem with the Grass starters is the same as the problem with all Grass Pokémon – that Game Freak have convinced themselves that most attack types are somehow not thematically appropriate for Grass Pokémon to have (i.e. Grass Pokémon Don’t Get Nice Things), and Grass itself is one of the weakest offensive types in the game. There’s also the broader problem that each new generation tends to give fewer tools to Pokémon with defence and support roles than to Pokémon with aggressive roles (except for II, when literally every Pokémon in the game started using Leftovers). So no, it’s never going to change; that would be way too much effort.

Anonymous asks:

Odd question, but do you have a favorite Fakemon, or one that you’re particularly fond of? If yes, what is it and why? Also for obvious reasons you’re not allowed to answer Scribis or Krakentoa :p

Tricky… I have a kinda awkward relationship with fakemon, in that there are clearly several really good ones out there, but there are also a lot of really rather dull ones, and I get bored sifting through to find the good ones… If I had to pick a favourite it’d probably be one of the ones from the BoltBeam project, since they had a good few that I thought were quite inspired… here’s a few that I was most fond of:

Capsikid and Pepricorn for being capsicum Pokémon that aren’t just humanoid chilli peppers, and being a very nice way of fusing two elements that are difficult to combine.
Wulverize for being just really bizarre and interesting.
Arthromemnon for being a very clean, nicely done fulfilment of a fairly simple concept.
Meipale, Pailock and Bakount for having such a cool ‘backstory.’
Niftea and Porslayne for combining a lot of weird design elements very elegantly.
Renownd for making Unown less pointless.
Sarkrend and Sarkrisis for being fossil Pokémon that aren’t just “hey, look at this extinct animal.”
Meurgot and Scaravera for doing something so cool with an interesting cultural phenomenon, and just ‘getting’ the Dark type so much better than a lot of fakemon do.

And honourable mentions to Kabllama and Alpacalypse for having the most awesome names ever.

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:

Theoretically speaking, what do you think Missingno would be like if it appeared in the Pokemon anime? Like, what would its origin story, nature, and powers be like to keep it as close to the game glitch as feasible?

You know how sometimes satellite TV gets all pixellated or cuts out entirely because the weather’s bad? It would look like that.

Okay, okay, serious answer. I think the obvious answer is that Missingno has to be an offshoot of the Porygon project, specifically of the technology that allows Porygon – a Pokémon composed entirely of data, of information – to manifest itself as a physical entity. Missingno can similarly convert data into physical reality… but not always smoothly. You can’t just plug in the code for the Pac-Man video game and have the character Pac-Man materialise in front of you, fully realised and functional; you need to have a program that was specifically written with this process in mind, like Porygon was. Any other form of data that goes into Missingno results in a garbled mess of matter and energy. What we “see” as Missingno’s body is actually Missingno’s best effort to interpret the countless radio waves and other signals that are constantly passing through it. If you just give Missingno a real, physical object, though, it can break that object down into a workable code with which it can create copies of that object. At some point shortly after its creation the thing crashed through a natural history museum somewhere, and as a result it “knows” how to create copies of several Pokémon fossils. It’s also possible to coax Missingno to spit out multiple copies of any small object you want (you can’t do this to living things or most larger objects because of safety features built into the core of the original program). Getting close enough to Missingno to do this isn’t always safe, though – if it picks up on your brain waves and tries to translate them into energy, the pseudo-physical nonsense it produces in response can often cause serious and lasting amnesia.