One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
Are bronzor and bronzong made out of copper? AFAIK bronze rusts into a ruddy red/brown color, and copper rusts into the teal color we see on bronzor and bronzong.
Speaking as someone who has actually dug legit 3500-year-old bronze objects out of the dirt, no; corroded bronze is blue-green, much like copper. Largely because bronze is, y’know, 90% copper.
A lot of pokemon seem not to get moves that would seem to fit them perfectly, because “they would be too good with them.” For example, snorlax doesn’t get slack off. Giratina, the god of the distortion world, doesn’t get trick room. Zekrom, who literally shakes the ground when sent out, can’t learn earthquake. And several explicitly evil pokemon, like chandelure, can’t learn nasty plot. There are several more, but these annoy me the most. But I understand the game needs to be balanced. Thoughts?
I don’t think that is the reason, to be honest. I mean, if preventing Pokémon from being “too good” was ever a matter of even the slightest concern for Game Freak, then making Giratina and Zekrom available to players in the first place was their mistake, not any specific item in their respective movepools. Even if they’d given Zekrom Earthquake, Reshiram would still have been even stronger because Dragon/Fire is just such a potent combination under 5th-generation rules (i.e. with no Fairy-types). I’m much more inclined to suspect some obscure flavour-related reason for these absences – like, Snorlax is literally always slacking off anyway, so he really shouldn’t expect to get any special bonus for doing so more than usual. Or perhaps they were simply oversights; it simply didn’t occur to the designers to stick Nasty Plot on Chandelure for some reason (I mean, when we think about this stuff we tend only to give any thought to the 5 or 10% of all moves that are useful at the competitive level; they presumably give consideration to the whole lot, so you can see how they might forget things that seem like obvious choices to us). Either way, eh. I have a saying: Pokémon should be good at the things they’re good at. If it makes sense, let them have it.
I heard that farfetch’d was put in the game to teach players a ‘lesson’ about trading a spearow that could evolve into a fearow for something that will only have limited usefulness (because fearow is so godly, right?), just like magikarp is there to be a lesson. You know what I did with magikarp? I put it in the daycare until the end of the game. It was at level 31 by that time and evolved into gyarados with no effort. Isn’t that what everyone did? Their lesson was lost.
Everyone? I beg to differ. Personally I’ve never done anything of the kind. And I think the point is there all the same – you evolved your Magikarp with no effort, but waited until the end of the game for it to reach a high enough level on its own, so you certainly had to exercise patience. Even if you catch a Magikarp at level 19 and use a Rare Candy to evolve it immediately, Magikarp still expresses one of Pokémon’s central themes, that something small and weak can grow into something great and powerful with the right kind of care. I don’t think we have to interpret Magikarp in such a narrow way. The lesson is “lost” if you choose to ignore it, but that’s always been the case for everything.
As for Farfetch’d… well, yes and no. It makes sense with Farfetch’d’s… wait, that doesn’t look right. Farfetch’ds? Farfetchd’s? Farfetch’s’d?
Continue reading “vikingboybilly asks:”Did you know you are on tvtropes?
I did, in fact; the user who created the page actually asked for my permission to do so, a few months back. I’m rather flattered anyone thought I was worth the effort.
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.
I was reminded that things like Delibird, Wobuffet, and Girafarig looked weird when they were introduced, and that was just in generation 2. Then by the time the next generation comes, the ones that looked weird in the last gen are comparitively normal. The oddest thing about delibird was that the bag is actually its tail, and it’s hollow. Does anybody remember that?
Is it actually hollow? I sort of assumed that the tail was flat and broad, and Delibird kind of rolled it up into a bundle. Honestly I thought it was kind of a creative way of giving Delibird a sack when Pokémon aren’t really ‘supposed’ to use manufactured items.
Happy new year! This question is random, but you do well at coming up with amusing responses to odd questions. Also I love your blog. Anyway: Do you have a new years resolution and what is it?
(Yes this is how far behind I am on questions; shut up)
I tend not to actually declare new year’s resolutions, because if you openly make a new year’s resolution and then fail to keep it, you’ll be cursed by Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways, beginnings and endings, and the new year. I know “god of doorways” doesn’t sound menacing, but trust me, you do not want to be on that guy’s bad side. But anyway… things that I generally want to do this year BUT ARE NOT FORMAL RESOLUTIONS, DO YOU HEAR ME JANUS include having my $#!t together more with regards to cooking for myself and keeping my apartment tidy, and also finding the time somewhere to go to Scotland and visit Jim the Editor because we haven’t seen each other (barring Skype) in over a year now.
In 2007 a Roman lighthouse was discovered in Istanbul. Comment?
…not 100% sure what you’re asking here. Istanbul (Constantinople) was at one point the capital of the Roman Empire, and as a major port city it’s a perfectly tenable place to put a lighthouse. It would make a good deal more sense than finding a Chinese lighthouse in Zurich, I can tell you that.
Wishful Thinking: The anime is getting rid of Ash, and is going to start the next generation’s anime with a totally new protagonist. And YOU have the opportunity to design them~ What sort of character do you design?
Hard to say… a lot of Ash’s existing personality traits are actually kind of useful ones for a main character to have, like it’s actually good for your main character in a fantasy world to be a little bit clueless, because the audience can learn about the world as they learn, and Ash’s enthusiasm for battling and capturing Pokémon are important for getting people to buy into the main premises of the franchise. So it’s probably good to keep those things… to an extent, anyway. But what might be different? Well, it would be nice to have the protagonist be a girl, for a change… and we could contrast Ash, who is if anything overly friendly with Pokémon he’s just met, with a character who has a bit more difficulty bonding with Pokémon, and has an initially more standoffish relationship with them, more like Gary… add a very curious, analytical bent, sort of like Red from Origins, to play into the Pokédex quest and the theme of exploration… something like that, I think.
What do you think of the different depictions of Pokémon between the main anime and Origins? For example, the way some moves are portrayed, Pokémon cries, or even the way Pokémon are recalled into their Poké Balls.
I don’t know; the only thing I really remember noticing was that Charmander sounds like a cat being strangled for some reason. I suppose abandoning the “Pokémon say their names” convention is meant as an effort to make them less cartoony, more like real animals, and I have no problem with this. To be honest, the rest is just swirly glowy things; depictions of those change a bit between seasons of the anime as well.
Pokémaniacal 