Dosidicus Giygas asks:

I enjoyed your PokéJungle piece on Galar. Do you think Sword and Shield might touch on the darker sides of the Industrial Revolution (the immiserated working class, poor environmental conditions, colonialism, etc) as well?

I’m glad you liked it; it’s one of the more… I guess “meaningful” things I feel like I’ve written in a while, and some of the ideas it touches on are, I think, important. (Here it is, for anyone who hasn’t read it)

So… might they? Well, would they? Could they? I might have said no, that Game Freak just isn’t prepared to touch serious real-world stuff like that. They’ll put you into a high-stakes battle against reality-warping entities for the fate of the world, sure, but learning that you and your society might be the things putting the world at risk? That’s another kind of serious. It’s not even that it’s a more adult kind of serious, because a lot of adults don’t enjoy stories like that either. Not even Black and White go there; N asks the questions, but we’re always framed as the good guys, and in the end he sees that we’re right. Then again… a different kind of storytelling, where social ills are as important as “villains,” if not more so… that sounds a lot like the Team Skull plotline of Sun and Moon. It’s always baby steps with this stuff; Pokémon is always an escapist fantasy that imagines an idealised world of harmony between humanity and nature, and we’re not going to see a really “gritty” story that gives a “realistic” portrayal of the evils that came with British industrialisation. If we see things like poverty or environmental damage, they’ll be things that we the players can fight and fix by doing typically heroic things, however unrealistic that might be, because Pokémon is always hopeful. I also don’t think the aesthetic of the presumed “villains,” Team Yell, has much thematic resonance with those ideas. But those societal forms of “darkness” might not be totally off limits anymore either.

Latest PokéJungle pieces

In case you haven’t been watching my Twitter feed, here’s two articles I recently wrote for PokéJungle:

From last week, the second entry in my “Gym Leaders Rated” series, on Misty.

And just up this morning, a think-piece I’ve titled “Galar, the Industrial Revolution and the Philosophy of Pokémon,” which is about why I think Great Britain is a particularly interesting place to have a Pokémon region, especially following Alola.

hoennian asks:

uh oh so [SWSH spoilers fwiw)

galarian ponyta just got Officially Announced and it’s described as having been “exposed to the overflowing life energy of the forest over many generations, and this is why their appearance became unique in this region”
buuuuuut

it’s a psychic type

does this do anything to or for your Fairy-is-life-energy theories? or does it still also just kinda feed into “typing is nonsense”?

While we’re here, this will also serve as my answer to the question from another reader who gives their name simply as “Getting Shield!!!”:

Galarian Ponyta, thoughts?

So… I think it’s fine. Unicorns are an emblem of Scotland, so it certainly fits Galar as a Pokémon inspired by the culture and history of Great Britain. It’s quite pretty. It’s a point in favour of a prediction made by my esteemed PokéJungle colleague Jon that suggests we can guess which Pokémon are getting Galarian forms on the basis of new egg moves given out in Ultra Sun and Moon, so that’s quite nice if you’re interested in the prediction game. Psychic is a weird type to choose, in my opinion, for something as obviously “fairytale” as a unicorn – back in the X and Y era, Jim the Editor and I actually thought it was a bit weird that the base Kantonian Ponyta and Rapidash hadn’t been promoted to Fire/Fairy, because it would have made perfect sense and produced an interesting unique dual-type. But that brings us to…

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N asks:

Never have i seen a community turn around as fast as the pokémon community when they heard about gen 7. Things like having 2 games with slighlty different pokémon are now being touted as exploitative towards the consumer, critiques against the animations are aplenty. Your thoughts? Do you think the criticism is warranted or is the Internet being a bunch of crybabies again?

I don’t know if something specific prompted this question – “again” makes me think there’s been another change in the wind since I posted this, but I’m not aware of anything in particular?

The thing is… there are loads of legitimate criticisms of Pokémon, and I am totally here for criticising Pokémon; it’s what I do. The whole “paired game” thing has always been weird and is frankly kind of obsolete, and the practise of releasing what amounts to an expansion as a full new game in (almost) every generation honestly is pretty consumer-unfriendly. No one owes Nintendo and Game Freak their money or time, and we should all be prepared to criticise the media we consume. The trouble is that the internet is a toxic cesspit that unfailingly reduces all human communication to corrosive bile sooner or later, which is why Jim the Editor should let me delete my Twitter account. Even perfectly legitimate points just get subsumed into this appalling tidal wave of angry unreflective hot takes and reactions, because the internet is deathly allergic to nuance. That’s not even the fault of any individual person involved in the discussion; it’s just the inevitable result of a structure that favours clickbait over substance and encourages us to outsource all our opinions to figureheads or group identities. I’d like to decide what I think of this game after I’ve actually played it. Not everyone can do that, because games are expensive and we don’t have infinite money, but you can pick a sensible reviewer, whose opinions on a range of other games are similar to your own, and wait for them to play it and decide what they think. It’s okay if launch day arrives and you still don’t know whether you want to buy the game or not; I’ve never preordered a Pokémon game or started playing on day 1. There’ll be plenty of time to make up our minds about what criticism is or is not deserved after that.

Herald of Opera asks:

So, apparently the National Dex is going away. For all the Internet riots that have been going on about this, wasn’t it pretty much inevitable that the series would eventually create more Pokémon than it could fit in one game? And I’m saying all this despite knowing my personal favorite is almost certainly getting the axe (sorry Piplup, but you’re a non-Kanto starter, your animal basis doesn’t live in the same hemisphere as Britain, and your anime appearance was an obnoxious spotlight stealer)

Okay, I’m gonna hijack this question to get out everything I think about this and be the one and hopefully only time I talk about it, so here goes nothing:

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dyna-what now?

okay, we just had a thing, let’s talk about the thing

anyone who hasn’t watched the Pokémon Direct broadcast and wants to watch it for themselves, or just wants to not watch it and wait for Sword and Shield, stay out, ’cause I’m going to be talking about the thing

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Name (required) asks:

So with Q-Fusion Hyper Abilities being a thing in gen VIII, how do you think they will impact the metagame?

Well, it was certainly a bold choice to give such a significant buff to all Pokémon with the letter q in their English names, but frankly it’s a pretty short list, and if you manage to fit two of those Pokémon onto your team, and manage to spend a turn fusing them, you deserve to get the ridiculous hyper-abilities. Rayquaza would probably still prefer to mega-evolve than Q-fuse, but most of the others seem really powerful, and the beneficiaries are mostly Pokémon who haven’t gotten a whole lot of attention in the past. Nidoquanid should be a powerhouse with Q-BubbleForce turning all its best attacks into super-powered dual-type Water versions that bypass immunity abilities. Vespiqwilfish can stall forever since Q-Presstimidation drops the opponent’s attack stats every time they try to hurt you. Eviolite Tranquilladin being immune to Flying attacks (as well as truly a ridiculous number of other things) thanks to Q-BigPecksProof makes it a really interesting counter to a lot of Pokémon. Eviolite Squilava’s Q-FlashFireDish lets it heal not just from using Fire attacks or even being hit by Fire attacks, but from being in Sunny Day, or being in the party while someone else uses Fire attacks, or even just thinking about fire (and I admit it does seem a little excessive that the game will upgrade your Switch with a brain-scan capability just to facilitate this effect, but the flavour/design justification is so good that in my opinion it’s absolutely worth it).

Honestly these things are going to totally run away with the entire game if J-Armour GigaTech Moves turn out not to be the hard counter they’re supposed to be.

Dosidicus Giygas asks:

So apparently “Galar” is a Scots-Gaelic word that means disease. I wonder if Game Freak knows this?

Hmmm… whoops?

You know, I would love it if they did know this. You could make it an early hint at a kind of hidden dystopian reality behind Galar’s very standard happy-go-lucky Pokéverse façade, where Poké-Scotland is being oppressed by the Poké-English bastards and they call the united region by a name that means “disease” to express their true feelings about it. I’m just not sure Game Freak have it in them to be so delightfully subversive, though! Jim the Editor says “Galar” reminds him of galahs, which are a sort of very noisy pink and grey parrot they have in Australia, and that’s probably not what Galar refers to either, but at least you could conceivably make a Pokémon out of it.

jeffthelinguist asks:

So… armored evolution. I think it’s not gonna be a thing and I think it’s stupid but… what do you think about the rumor? How would you feel if that was implemented?

I wouldn’t rule it out, honestly. For those not following, the place this rumour comes from is a 4chan post from a few days before the announcement of Sword and Shield, which correctly predicted the names of the new games, and that they would be set in a region based on Great Britain, so it’s not wildly improbable that this person had some actual insider information (of course, even if they did, they might have had real information on the names and region, but then just made up other stuff to troll everyone, because… like… it’s 4chan, guys, come on). One of the other predictions made therein is that Sword and Shield will introduce “armoured” evolutions, of Pokémon including Zeraora, Charizard, Flygon and Mewtwo. And, I mean, you know you’ve wanted armoured Mewtwo since 1999, and Nintendo has just filed for the Japanese trademark on “Armoured Mewtwo,” and oh hey, they’re remaking that movie in 3D this year for some goddamn reason, and my respect for the Pokémon Company is just tenuous enough to believe that they would do that solely to plug an “armoured evolution” of Mewtwo. A further prediction from the 4chan post is that Meltan will somehow be involved with all this, which… I mean, honestly, yeah; Meltan should start pulling its fµ¢£ing weight already.

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