redwoodalchan | Entries tagged with pokemon

I've been rereading "Family Matters" recently (just because), and it really stuck out to me just how much of a copout the part where Jessie realizes she's not pregnant is. The thing is, at the beginning of the story she mentions taking THREE separate pregnancy tests and having all of them come up positive. I actually did a bit of research into this (since I'm writing a fanfic of my own that features a scene in which the main character's mom realizes she's pregnant with him), and it would be really very rare for even one pregnancy test to throw a false positive, if they were used correctly (as in, once the woman realizes her period is late). Maybe it would have been more believable in the Nineties, but even that seems like a stretch. They try to explain it away by claiming that the birth control hormones circulating in her system were tricking her body into thinking it's pregnant, but that's such a forced rationalization it's hard to take seriously--particularly since it raises the question of why Jessie didn't think of that herself earlier (or, for that matter, why Jessie would even notice her period was late in the first place if she'd been taking her pills at the time).

Just...the entire thing reads like Cori really, desperately wanted Jessie to be pregnant at that time, but couldn't reconcile it with the fact that she wouldn't have been pregnant at this point in canon. So, she wrote all those pages of hand-wringing about whether Jessie was pregnant--which she actually WANTED to write--and then pulled some explanation for how she wasn't actually pregnant out of her ass as a sort of retcon and hoped her readers wouldn't think too hard about it.

The really funny thing is that in "Never Too Late" she writes a scene almost EXACTLY like the one in "Family Matters" in which Jessie's mom reveals she's pregnant with her. Since I'm pretty sure she wrote "Family Matters" before "Never Too Late," she probably decided to make "Never Too Late" the surprise pregnancy fic she really wanted to write all along.

Current Mood: amused

*Sigh* I said I was going to make a fanfic based around the idea of Cori feeding Jessie, James, and Meowth tons of food, so here it is.

This is kinda sorta AU; there’s nothing about it that strictly contradicts canon (I hope) but it doesn’t have a specific time or place relevant to any other part of canon. It’s just…a side quest, if you will. It also gets a bit headcanon-heavy, especially down the road.

( Read Part 1 )

Current Mood: bouncy

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Music: "Team Rocket: Double Trouble"

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: calm
Crossposts: http://sweettalkeress.livejournal.com/27794.html

Legato is seriously the best name for a male Gardevoir in the history of ever.

*Sigh* In other news, I'm debating whether I should continue to capitalize the names of pokemon or whether I should switch to using the lower-case versions. This just came up because I'm writing a research paper on RL animals, and while some reports capitalize their names (it's apparently quite common in birding circles, for example) most don't. I'm inclined to think I will continue to capitalize them, just because if it's consistency I'm after, it'll look a lot less consistent if I suddenly switch to using lower-case names.

Current Mood: artistic

Am I the only one who's a bit frustrated by the tendency of some fans to treat the regions in the Pokemon games like they're exactly the same as the place they're based on? I mean, they're fairly obviously not--Unova, to cite an example I'd be most familiar with, may be based on New York City, but it clearly isn't New York City. If it were actually New York City it would have a stage theatre district, not a big-budget film studio. It would have a subway which everybody used, a park containing its central reservoir which everyone knew about, and a natural history museum that showed exhibits about dinosaurs and space rather than dragons. It wouldn't have tons of woods that anyone could get lost in between developed points--every inch of it would be developed with some areas clearly set aside to allow for greenery. It would have specific streets dedicated to Chinese culture, Italian culture, Jewish culture, and the list goes on. And near as we can tell, Unova has none of these things at all.

Similarly, if Sinnoh were actually Hokkaido it would mostly be a national park, which would be home to raccoon-dogs instead of Houndour. It would also have a train line that could take you to the other regions, but no such train line exists. If Hoenn were truly Kyushu it wouldn't have a community of people who live entirely in trees, or on the water. If Johto were really Chubu region (I believe that's what it's based on), it would have lead and zinc mines that made rural women living downstream sick. And so on. Even if you accept that certain facets of the culture of these places aren't shown because they're not relevant to the gameplay, the mere fact that there are pokemon living there, and that the cities have names unlike any seen in the real world (if, indeed, they're based on real-life places), makes it pretty clear that these aren't places that exist in the real world.

I mean, I get that the Pokemon regions are based on those of the real world, and I can even buy that their cultures would be similar to those of the real-world places. But some fans seem to want to argue that they're exactly the same, down to the last details of ethnicity and history, and I just don't get that at all.

Don't get me wrong--I still think they're the scourge of the Pokemon fandom. But they have a point when they note that the mechanics that worked perfectly well in the Kanto and Johto games do not necessarily work as well in the games that came after.

The basic mechanic of the Pokemon games in the main series is and always has been fairly straightforward: you catch pokemon, and then you use them to fight other pokemon, be they wild pokemon or pokemon with trainers attached to them. And in the first- and second-generation games that worked just fine because those games had no real storyline--the entire objective of them was to simply defeat all the increasingly powerful trainers in the game and prove you were the best. But starting with the Hoenn games, they started to introduce something resembling a coherent storyline, and while in a lot of ways that was pretty cool, it created problems. Because the mechanics of the games didn't change, they now had all these complex plots, every one of which had to be resolved by having a pokemon battle, regardless of what the most appropriate course of action would realistically be in that situation (to cite a favorite example, if N thinks it's so wrong to make pokemon fight, why does he keep challenging you to battles?).

So while I'm never going to think that the first- and second-generation games are superior to the ones that came after, I will say that it does seem as though the games have "outgrown" their original mechanics, as it were, at least by the time Generation V rolled around. Of course, Generation V also introduced some significant changes to the gameplay (such as ending the game after the big bad has been defeated, thus ending the main storyline, rather than after you become champion), so it may be that they're aware of this and working on it for the next gen.

Current Mood: geeky

What I want is a fanfic of Grimsley from Pokemon BW being a good person. Like, mentoring a new trainer, or being really sweet to his pokemon, or just somehow being a good Samaritan. And I've wanted this for awhile now but never found such a fic to my liking. I guess you could call it a desire for redress after that completely-awful fanfic I sporked awhile ago in which he was an evil rapist for absolutely no good reason at all.

Although...recently I've revisited the author of that fanfic. Upon further consideration, I would almost (almost) be prepared to defend this author to an extent, on the grounds that it does seem like her heart's in the right place (maybe) but she's just so steeped in her own internalized prejudices (and so incompetent of an author) that what she's trying to say comes out all wrong. Granted, this faint praise is coming from the woman who's now suffered through the disgusting misogynistic atrocity that is Twisted! and is currently in the process of writing a new spork of a Pokemon DPPt fic that dares to blame Dawn for losing her "virginity" to Cyrus...through rape! *Headdesk*

For those of you who don't follow my sporkings and commentary religiously, I just defended the moron who brought you "Darkest Night" and "Silver Bindings" on the grounds that she at least never pretends her rapists are anything but the bad guys.

Current Mood: cold

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: giddy

This has been bugging me for awhile, and now I feel it's about time I vented.

( cut because it got long )So, yeah! Enough with the nostalgia whoring already! The first generation is not objectively better than the later ones, so just shut up and enjoy the damn games!

Current Mood: aggravated

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: cynical

So I visited the Ask Peta!Ash tumblr a bit ago and posted something about how his methods were against the rules, in the hopes of getting him to say "Screw the rules, I have money!" (since this Peta!Ash acts so much like Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh! Abridged).

This was the result.

It's not the exact wording, but it'll do XD

...is the Tumblr blogs made in its "honor." They have "ask" blogs of many of the characters from it now, and some of these are hilarious.

I especially love the ask PeTA!Ash blog. It's hilarious what they've managed to come up with. All PeTA!Ash ever seems to think about is money. He acts like Seto Kaiba in "Yu-Gi-Oh! Abridged." And I think he once killed Gary because Gary wanted to do the same thing and make money like he did? Hell if I know, it's not like it makes much sense. Whatever, it's safe to say that the funniest blogs are probably the ones where the characters act the least like their canon selves--so PeTA!Ash and PeTA!Cheren have their characters acting more OOC than PeTA!Ghetsis, and thus are (marginally) funnier (there's even a hilarious post on Ask PeTA!Cheren about how he can undergo convergent evolution to evolve into either the sexy gym leader we how from canon or the strawman we see in PeTA's game).

But anyway, I've got Ask PeTA!Ash, Ask PeTA!Cheren, and Ask PeTA!Ghetsis on my dashboard now so I posted their addresses below. There's also an ask blog for the Pikachu featured in the game, and there may be more, but I haven't seen them and don't have them on hand.

Ask PeTA!Ash
Ask PeTA!Cheren
Ask PeTA!Ghetsis

Current Mood: amused

So here's a little something I've worked out. It's long been my impression that you could essentially take the first four villain bosses and assign each one an alchemical element. Observe:

Giovanni is a ground-type Gym Leader when he's not being a Team Rocket boss, so his element is earth.

Archie is a pirate who wants to expand the sea, so his element is water.

Maxie is the leader of an organization called Team Magma, who likes volcanoes, so his element is fire.

Cyrus was trickier, but in broad strokes, his element seems to be air. Think about it: his organization's headquarters are on a mountain face, his plan comes to fruition on top of a mountain, his star pokemon is a giant crow, and he's even named after a celestial object. There's also the fact that air, in certain circles, is associated with intellect at the expense of emotion (which is basically what Cyrus believes in).

So with that in mind, try applying them to any other form of media that has those four elements involved....

( See the examples I've got )

Yeah. There may be many more options, but I can't think of any more that I can bring to make sense.