Tag: QandA

Why are the female protagonists in the pokemon anime so flat? The only one that had a semblance of a personality was Misty, and she’s a b*&$&^. May and Dawn like pokemon contests, have weird hair… they’re… nice? That’s it. I can’t even describe Iris at all, she’s so boring. I never watched any of the X and Y series, so I assume that… whatever her name is, is totally flat and boring. Why bother? Where’s Brendan and plant-head to replace Ash?

To be honest I would suggest that the real problem here is that deep and complex characters are just not really a strength of the Pokémon anime in general.  I actually like Misty; I think that her more worldly, sometimes cynical attitude is a nice contrast to Ash’s unfettered idealism.  I’m not really familiar enough with the others to properly defend them, or invested enough in them to bother.

Why do some people think Pokémon is slavery. Do you and your readers agree the same thing? Is it impossible to think Pokemon can choose to like fighting like humans too? Let us hear you and their responses.

To be honest, I think the answer to that question is sort of obvious.  People think Pokémon is slavery because, on the face of it, that’s kind of what it looks like!  We keep wild animals in tiny balls and make them fight each other, for goodness’ sake.  That’s really the whole reason I used to talk about this stuff quite a lot; because it’s worth talking about.  It’s worth thinking about why Pokémon training ‘works’ in the franchise’s internal logic; it’s worth thinking about what makes it okay and why.  It’s also worth questioning how far Pokémon really benefit from the current social order, which I think is something Game Freak want us to be asking: look at the conclusion to Black and White 2, where N is more or less convinced of the rightness of Pokémon training as such, but is now committed to “[freeing] Pokémon and humans [my emphasis]… from the oppression of Pokéballs” – I think what that’s meant to suggest is that there was, is and always will be something intrinsically right about that partnership, but that at some point in human history, something went wrong, and Pokéballs have something to do with that.  To me, this is the whole reason Pokémon is interesting!  Superficially, it has these obviously problematic themes that need to be dealt with, and you can deal with those very effectively if you dig deeper – but deeper still, and you begin to suspect that maybe something is wrong here after all, something much more subtle that crept up on them and caught them unawares, long ago.

Suggested further reading: this webcomic.  It’s mostly comedic for the first ten pages or so but it gets very interesting after that; trust me on this one.

this might be a bit out there but, i’m curious about your past nicknames for your pokemon. Your current team has good names (I especially like Olive) and I recall an Invicta? or along those lines. My names are always lame, please share some of yours!

Y’know, it’s weird that I spend so much time on nicknames, because one of my odder beliefs about Pokémon is that they actually don’t understand or have any use for the concept of personal names; I think it’s purely something that humans project on them because it fits the way we like to think about our relationships with them.  I guess coming up with nicknames is just fun!  I always feel a deep sense of satisfaction when I think of a clever one, especially if I can shoehorn some Latin or Greek into it.  Like so…

Invicta was my Volcarona from my Black team – it’s the feminine form (because she was a female) of invictus, a Latin word that means “unconquerable;” I chose it because the sun god worshipped in the Roman Empire during the late 3rd century was called Sol Invictus – “the unconquerable sun.”

My Sealeo on Alpha Sapphire is called Lennon, after the Beatles’ John Lennon, because of their song “I am the Walrus.”

My Girafarig is called Panama, because of the classic palindrome that goes “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!”

My Heracross, who is female, is called Alcmene, after the mother of Heracles, because Heracross is supposed to be a Hercules beetle.

My Golduck is called Mad Eileen, for… reasons which… to be honest, now escape me.

Back on X now, my Pinsir is called Wesley, because Pinsir crushes things between its horns, making him Wesley the Crusher.

The first Smeargle I caught is called Fabius, after a Roman historian named Fabius Pictor – “pictor” being the Latin word for “painter.”  The shiny one I found soon after I caught him is called Mona, for obvious reasons.

My Sigilyph is called Digamma, after a letter of the archaic Greek alphabet that fell out of use by the classical period, because Sigilyph’s wings remind me of the shape of the letter.

My Floatzel is called Ronald, because Floatzel is orange and Weasley.

My (female) Gourgeist is called Claudia in reference to a somewhat obscure satire written by the Roman philosopher Seneca upon the death of the Emperor Claudius, who is its main target.  Its title is the Apocolocyntosis, which is a Greek compound word meaning something like “ascension to pumpkinhood” (contrast apotheosis, ascension to godhood, which is what’s supposed to happen to emperors when they die).

And my Delibird is called Jamesy because… well, sometimes there are inside jokes that only a few of my friends will get. 😉

If you were to have one Pokemon to be brought here in the real world, what would it be? (in terms of usefulness in real life, battling, and other mortal stuff)

Just one?  Hmm.  Well, I dimly recall someone asked me to bring an entire team into the real world once, and I honestly have trouble going past one of the Pokémon I picked then – Claydol.  The combination of Ground- and Psychic-type abilities means it could be taught to move the earth subtly, not just as part of an attack form, and it could sense things beneath the ground without having to dig them up.  I’m an archaeologist in real life; with enough training to refine them, powers like that would be a godsend!  Claydol’s no slouch in battle either, if need be, and it can even Teleport you from place to place.

Seeing as you love Greek mythology, imagine for a moment that you create 1 Pokemon based around a character/monster/god/goddess in Greek mythology. Who or what do you pick?

This is actually really hard.

‘cause, like, it’d be easy to just write up a mythological monster as a Pokémon, or a whole bunch of them for that matter.  It’s not actually creative, and for a lot of players it’s not introducing them to anything they haven’t already seen interpreted in all kinds of modern fiction, but it’s also really tempting because there’s so much low-hanging fruit that makes you think things like “yeah, it’d be really cool to catch and train a minotaur.”  I think that’s probably why Game Freak stays away from classical mythology.

I actually did wind up thinking through a lotus fruit Pokémon in response to an unrelated question a couple of weeks ago, and you could have a look at that, but you asked me to pick something, so I should come up with something different.  Hmmm… what if we tried to do something with the Graiai?  You know, the three old blind chicks that Perseus is a total dick to?  ’cause then you can do something with the one eye and the one tooth that the three of them have to share, you see – you can have one Pokémon, a humanoid Dark/Psychic-type or similar, that possesses terrible psychic powers but is also nearly helpless on its own because it’s blind and physically weak, then you can have a second Pokémon, maybe a Ghost-type or a Fairy-type or something, which is the eye, and it floats or hovers or something and maybe it has a major support focus, because it can’t fight very well on its own but it can see in total darkness and in all directions at once, and then you have a third one, which is the tooth, and it’s probably a Rock-type so you wind up with a sort of vaguely Bergmite-looking thing, and it’s blind too but it’s also big and tough and stupid and can crush up anything and eat it, so it doesn’t actually care.  And all three of them have this weird-ass symbiotic relationship where they go around together and protect each other (I think they must live in caves or ravines or other dark places, since two of them are completely blind), and the main one, the humanoid, has two different evolutions that are triggered by having one of the other two in your party, like how Remoraid helps Mantyke to evolve, where it takes on the characteristics of the Pokémon that’s accompanying it, becoming either all-seeing, calculating and strategic or powerful, blunt and aggressive.  Yeah.  Yeah, let’s do something like that.

I just had a strange idea–Zinnia’s name, with its first letter Z, is probably meant to evoke Zygarde and complete the XY of the original games. At the same time, we have AZ, whose name symbolizes the beginning and the end. Z(innia) only represents the end. So, what if Aster is the A in AZ’s name? Zinnia and AZ have similarities, like how AZ is immortal in spite of himself and Zinnia has a death wish she couldn’t act on. So if an “A” character is introduced, I wonder how they’d fit.

*shrug* Dunno.  It seems like the kind of vague symbolic nonsense that they like to do, but I’m not sure what we can do with it.  That’s an interesting point about the similarity between AZ and Zinnia, though; they’re both people who have reason not to fear death, even to welcome it, which is kind of neat considering the life/death and change/stasis themes of X and Y.

Where do you think the Ranger Union fits into the Pokemon universe? When a new region opens itself up to the world, do the Union and the Pokemon League need to duke it out to decide how the region joins the gov’t, so to speak? Or does the region get to decide on its own?

Well, is there only one Pokémon League (or only one Ranger Union, for that matter)?  I always got the impression that, with the exception of Kanto and Johto, each region had its own League which was more or less autonomous.

Anyway.  I only ever played the first Ranger title, so take anything I have to say with a grain of salt, but my understanding was that Fiore has a Ranger Union and not a Pokémon League for cultural reasons more than anything else.  People in Fiore don’t train Pokémon.  It’s just not a part of their way of life; they have a very different relationship with the Pokémon that live in their region.  Why would an organisation that is primarily responsible for Pokémon trainers and competitive Pokémon battling want to be involved with anything that happens there?  Likewise, the Ranger Union exists to deal with problems in human/Pokémon relations that would be handled by high-level Pokémon trainers in regions that have them.  Their purposes and activities don’t really give them any reason ever to be in competition with each other, as far as I can see.

i had a dream last night that they were remaking the first season of the Pokemon anime. Ash had a really cool outfit, and the animation was top-notch. In its opening, they even hinted that male protagonists from other games, like Ethan, were gonna get involved in the future. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a remix of the first theme of the series, which I think is just criminal. But regardless, do you think it’s plausible that they’d make a remake, and would you be for the idea?

Dunno.  I’m sort of unsure whether it’s necessary.  I feel like most of what you would get out of a remake you can also get out of just watching the ongoing seasons of the anime – it’s still Ash (who is of course eternal), the Pokémon anime isn’t really big on plots that span multiple episodes other than the whole badge quest thing (which is a constant in every season), and frankly the anime isn’t above recycling the plots of individual episodes either (with more nuanced treatments in later versions, it must be said – Dancing with the Ducklett Trio is basically a more polished version of All that Glitters that also has more stuff going on in the background).  And to be honest, I kinda like the quirkiness of the first season that would, if anything, probably be lost in a remake.  I mean, I wouldn’t really be against it either, because seeing my favourite episodes with updated animation would be neat, but… eh.