What inspired you to be refer to yourself as Pokemaniacal ole chap. wot wot

Well, point of nomenclature first; I don’t refer to myself as Pokémaniacal and never have.  The blog is Pokémaniacal; I am Chris, or Pokémaniac Chris to you – which is obviously just the standard class + name format the games use for naming trainers.  Anyway, I figured if the adjectival form of “maniac” is “maniacal” then the adjectival form of “Pokémaniac” must be “Pokémaniacal” and there you have it.  As for why I thought it was an appropriate name… well, read almost any of my entries and take a wild guess.

Is Pokémon your favorite franchise? Are there any you also enjoy? Also what makes you keep returning to the series?

For the first part, refer to this question from a few days ago: http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/69464174209/first-off-thank-you-for-the-amazing-content-ive

As for what keeps me coming back… hell, I don’t know.  I think by this point it’s mostly force of habit and sheer bloodymindedness.  The bastards have brainwashed me.  That, and I just like thinking about it sideways; it’s fun constructing arguments about culture and ethics in this universe.

In the first generation Red and Blue, pokemon lacked even happiness and similar features. However over the generations and addition to pokemon amie now, we saw an increase of pokemon’s side of things. Do you think giving pokemon some more varied behaviors other than just “obedience” trope would better single player aspect of the game? Choice too like what if the pokemon wants to be released? Or forced captures or pokemon just suddenly popping in and joining you? Would that be worse?

Better?

It would be different, and it would be more complicated.  I mean, ultimately, a lot of the things you’re suggesting would be the beginnings of giving every individual Pokémon a basic AI – which… you know… would not be easy; I mean, I’m no programmer, but some people have hundreds of the bloody things running round on one game.  If Pokémon decide that they want to be released completely at random, it’d just be annoying; there needs to be some kind of actual decision-making framework in there.  Similarly, Pokémon popping out of nowhere at random and joining you for no reason doesn’t add anything.  You need a system where individual Pokémon can react to stimuli in different ways and let past experiences influence their future actions, which would be kinda complicated.  Having to manage the personalities of six different Pokémon would also make it a very different kind of game.  There’s probably some middle ground in there between “Byzantine” and “pointless,” but I think it’d be tremendously easy to get stuff like this very wrong.  I’m okay with continuing to take this kind of thing slowly.

Would Pokémon call their trainer by what? Master? Trainer? By name? In the anime, pokemon called Ash, by his name, never by master or trainer. Do you think Master as a title sort of gives negative vibe?

Eh.  Well, this is… difficult.  We see Pikachu’s vocalisations (and those of Ash’s other Pokémon) translated as ‘Ash’ in one or two places (all I can think of, actually, is Island of the Giant Pokémon, but there might be others that I’m not aware of or not remembering) but we don’t know what he’s literally saying.  Like, Pikachu really can’t make a wide enough range of sounds that he can realistically produce Pikachu-ese equivalents to any given human name; that’s simply impossible.  I tend to believe that when Pokémon speak they rely a lot on body language and a variety of other species-specific non-verbal cues to convey information, since they clearly understand a lot more than they’re capable of expressing through words, but nonetheless, we don’t actually know how close those subtitles are to the exact meaning of what is going through Pikachu’s head.  The word he uses for Ash (pikapi) could easily mean something like ‘my trainer’ or ‘my master’ or even ‘blue jacket human’ to him, and simply be translated for us as ‘Ash.’  Furthermore, it would be assuming a lot to think that the English word ‘master’ would have the same connotations for Pokémon as it does for us.

Side note: I actually don’t believe that Pokémon understand or have any use for the concept of personal names, which is why I’m skeptical about the subtitles being a totally faithful rendition.  They’re perfectly capable of learning and responding to their own nicknames, but I don’t think that they (well, most species anyway) have any equivalent to the concept.

Aaaah yes, I can finally ask you! Have you seen the ghost girl in Lumiose? And the Mamoswine being photographed? Also, are you planning on watching the XY anime? It’s only about 10 episodes in at the moment and there are subs available. Earlier this year I tried watching the entire anime and I got to episode 300 or so before I gave up, it just wasn’t that interesting… but I’m totally hooked with this new one! I don’t know how much of it has to do with it not being a poor dub though.

Oh, right.  I did see both of those, but I forgot to comment on them.  I’m not sure I understand the logic behind choosing a Mamoswine as the spokesperson (…spokespokémon?) for a cosmetics company, but hey, if it sells, why not?  And the weird ghost chick… yeah, I have no idea what that’s about.  I sort of figured that maybe if you came back later, after filling some requirement, she’d do something else?  I don’t know.  Creepy as f#@$ though.

I’ll probably watch the X and Y series at some point, but I don’t really like watching the anime subtitled, personally.

YO DUDE. Just for clarification, do you have any pokemon world building fan ideas you like to think in addition with the canon then?

Not really?  I tend to think of what I’m doing here in similar terms to the way I think of studying history and archaeology, which is my “real job” – there are the “primary sources” (that is, the games and anime), and there are our interpretations, and although it can be interesting and productive to compare interpretations, for me everything has to go back to the sources.  When I read what another person thinks, my instinct is to dissect it into bits that make sense to me and bits that don’t, and assess it in terms of how well it fits with what we all know.  Of course, a good story is a good story, but I think that’s entirely separate to what I normally do.  Does that make sense?

First off, thank you for the amazing content…I’ve read all of it, and look forward to reading the rest. Secondly, besides Pokémon, which games would you consider your ” favorite ” ?

…I’m not sure I understand.  If you’ve read all of it, what are you looking forward to reading?

Anyway.  My… second-favourite video game?  Um.  That’s a tough one.  Uh… it kinda fluctuates?  For a long time it was probably the Baldur’s Gate series but I haven’t played those games in some time (although I would not hesitate to call them classics).  Sid Meier’s Civilisation is definitely up there, even though I never actually played I or IV.  The Age of Empires series has a lot of nostalgia value (Age of Mythology being my favourite, for reasons which should be obvious to those who know me…).

Someone who knew the games in question and had read a lot of my stuff (particularly the “If I Were In Charge” series) could probably analyse this list and come up with some frighteningly incisive observations about my personality and my value as a human being.