HEATMOR IS BEAUTIFUL AND PRECIOUS DON”T YOU TALK ABOUT IT THAT WAY seriously though it is actually one of my favourite 5th generation Pokémon because the idea of “okay let’s take an anteater and GRAFT IT TO AN IRON SMELTER” is just so bizarre that I can’t not love it.  Heatmor could have been drawn by an actual child and I would still love it.

i don’t f$%^ing know; I’m sure someone’s asked me this before but I can’t be bothered finding the link to the old question because I have had too much gin.  I think I made noises about the grandmother hypothesis in human longevity which will answer all of your questions if you google it. (hint: it won’t actually answer all your questions; I was lying; it will actually raise more and better questions)

Hrrm.  Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think Lucario particularly needs all that much more in the way of uniqueness.  Aura Sphere is already a very rare and unusual thing, and makes Lucario one of only five non-legendary Pokémon in the game with a good Fighting-type special attack (no, Focus Miss does not count), and one of only two to get the same-type attack bonus for it.  He has a type combination shared only with Cobalion, and his Mega form already has an amazing ability.  From the other side, well, I don’t really know anything about Super Smash Bros., but Pokémon already has techniques that get stronger when you take damage – Reversal, Flail, Endeavour – which are fairly widely distributed.  In fact, Riolu (and by extension Lucario) actually can learn Reversal, and even gets STAB.  Those moves just don’t get used very much – by Lucario, or anyone else – because one-on-one fights in Pokémon, particularly with a relatively fragile character like Lucario, tend to be fairly quick, brutal affairs, and it’s difficult to control how low your health gets.  So… eh.  I’m not really sold on it.

…sure?

*shrug* No idea.  I think I might have liked them more that way.  I have kind of a weird relationship with Trubbish and Garbodor, though, in that the thing I most disliked about them had nothing to do with the trash/garbage aesthetic. I was more upset because I felt they were just a rehash of Grimer and Muk, which is something that was kind of a recurring theme with me throughout Black and White – I was annoyed by how many of Unova’s Pokémon seemed like one-to-one replacements for the absent first-generation Pokémon.  So I can’t really speak for the fanbase there.

Hmm.  What have I said about Cubone before?  Let’s see… well, someone brought up the whole “Cubone are orphaned Kangaskhan” thing, and my feeling there is that I think there would be clearer evidence for it if Game Freak actually intended us to see them that way, but it’s a cool idea and makes sense.  That doesn’t help us much when we actually hatch Cubone though, because we have no dead parent if that happens.  I think Cubone born to living Marowak parents must have to go and find skulls and clubs from ancestral ‘graveyard’ sites, which they maintain because reverence for the dead is so important to their species.  It’s a kind of rite of passage for them.

If you want to explain how a baby Cubone just immediately pops out of the egg with a skull already on his adorable little head, with no spiritual quest or anything like that necessary, well, obviously the real reason is that creating special breeding mechanics just for Cubone was clearly a waste of time, and we sort of have to accept it as a necessary gameplay abstraction.  Alternatively, though… I don’t know if anyone’s even considered this, but just to go all Occam’s Razor on you, maybe the whole thing is just a story?  Like, is it possible that the skull thing is honestly just what Cubone look like, and people came up with this strange mythology around them to explain their menacing appearance and haunting wails, which then gets reported as fact in the Pokédex because the Pokédex is approximately 48% complete bull$#!t?  We never see them remove the skull helmets, so who’s to say those aren’t really part of their heads?  That makes the whole thing remarkably easy, albeit a little less exciting.

Well, as I understand it, coral is a sort of communal organism not altogether unlike a jellyfish, but sedentary and hard-bodied, so Water 3 makes a lot of sense.  Water 1, to be honest, is composed of all kinds of insane nonsense and I’m not sure there’s any point looking for a consistent rationale there.  To me it seems like the primary idea of that group is ‘Water-types that are also comfortable on land,’ and Corsola does fit that, although it does put us in strange places when we start making comparisons to real-world evolutionary biology.  If anything I’m actually a lot more puzzled about Clamperl and Horsea being in that group.

…would we?  I’m… not sure I agree with that at all.  But sure, whatever.