Dex

Big hearted fluffdragon...

...fictional ex-90s platformer mascot, nerd, plural, ΘΔ.



TalenLee
@TalenLee

a consistent angle I see taken on pokemon is 'wow, this world is fucked up, the teenagers have access to powerful tools' or 'kids can roam around on their own' or 'man, it's like cock fighting,' and all of that stuff only makes sense if you pretend the world doesn't work the way it demonstrates itself as working.

Like, pokemon are sentient. We know this. Pokemon express sentience and agency and they can visibly, tangibly, absolutely ignore their trainers. It's a recurrent point in every game that they won't just do any old things for you, or to one another. We know pokemon are choosing to get into fights, for example.

We know healthcare for pokemon is widespread. We know food is freely available. We know that pokemon can make lodgings and we know they can shelter people and we know they can influence the weather.

Pokemon is a universe where things are pretty okay and things get bad because of a small number of assholes operating under some degree of secrecy. People who want to criticise this world do it with the toolset of 'well, what if the kid is a shitty asshole with an abusive mindset' because we live in world where kids, given power, sometimes do terrible things, and that's usually tied to things like 'kids don't have support and love around them.'

My favourite example of 'the pokemon world is a nicer place' is when Team Skull take over a poke centre to charge people for health care, they charge you 100 pokebucks. About the cost of a can of soda from a vending machine. Like these people have enclosured an essential service, and their profit margin on this thing is... 'buy me a soda.' They don't conceive of immense wealth or gouging prices and they're criminals doing this.


xkeeper
@xkeeper

My favourite example of 'the pokemon world is a nicer place' is when Team Skull take over a poke centre to charge people for health care, they charge you 100 pokebucks. About the cost of a can of soda from a vending machine.

⅓ of the cost, even; celadon's rooftop vending machines have em for 300

"yeah we've fully healed everything to the best of our ability. that'll be one quarter, thanks"


atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

Christopher Nolan's next movie should be about the war Lt. "The Lightning American" Surge fought in



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in reply to @TalenLee's post:

Now, I'm not up to date on the pokemon lore, but my concern was always: what do people eat? Like if most (all?) of the animals are sentient, and a lot of the plants too, what's safe and ethical to eat? Is it just a lot of grilled cheeses and yogurt?

So like, there's a few interpretations. Early on in the anime, you have "normal" food, like fish just being there that is non-pokemon. It makes no sense, but they just roll with it. Not everything has to always make sense.

And then the anime also alludes to people eating some pokemon, or eating its products, such as milk from a miltank, or magikarp sushi.

There is meat being eaten, and it's true and undeniable that people eat pokemon, and I wonder, is there a whole class of people who don't give a shit while most trainers feel a general sense of attachment and go vegan/vegetarian?

Is milk from a miltank vegan?

Milk from a miltank is vegan!
They will feed both humans and pokémon, and have been doing so since ancient times. Their milk is naturally sweet and very nutritious.
They appreciate if their milker has a good rhythm.
Somehow, miltank yoghurt is perfectly fine for people with lactose intolerance.

... This is all extracted from pokédex entries.

Some meat products also are sort of... regenerative. I have vague recollections regarding Slowpoke Tail, specifically, where it's revealed that they're both a delicacy, and just grow back once severed. There was also a subplot here and there regarding the questions of how to ethically and sustainably "harvest" these tails without distressing the otherwise very, very (adorably) unflappable Pokemon.

In such a world with such heavy environmentalist themes built into it, I'd imagine that while some Pokemon are edible, it's handled sustainably and with as much thought put into it as possible. (After all, the leaves and flowers from some grass-types have been noted to be edible/medicinal.)

... Oh yeah, there's also the Nacli/Naclstack/Gargnacl line, which are just. Enormous golems made out of salt deposits. And they happily grind up parts of their bodies so the crowds of Pokemon that follow them can get a tasty snack, or to even salt cure wounded wild Pokemon.

There's a lot going on! But I imagine it's going on... optimistically!

Kind of? The early games and anime seasons had a few references to real animals, but those seem to have been ignored or retconned away in the later games/seasons. On the other hand, you have the pokedex referring to pokemon as stuff like "the mouse pokemon", which seems to imply that you should know what a mouse is (but maybe "mouse" is just a shape to them idk).

This is always how I saw the Legendary Encounters. Like "I'm about to put the power to shape continents into your hands. I gotta' make sure you're strong and responsible enough for this, first, alright?"

and also like Arceus is explicitly mentioned to be able to just make a fragment to themselves to give to the trainer so wouldn't surprise me if the higher-end legendaries are doing that as well when you catch them

honestly, the way I always saw it is, that the worlds in pokemon games are from a distant future as a virtual, synthesized world that's let to its own devices, but one inside of which, people are unaware of anything beyond this particular constructed universe, in a "cave allegory" sort of way.

anything "natural" in that world, that would exist out here, does so in a potemkin-village way. their "earth" is flat, their "time" is strictly linear and their "gravity" is "down", until and unless outer space is being visited. the people in this world may have the concept of science, modern affordances of technology and the like, but it is formed of pokemon. the "quarks" of this world, are the type system, and their interactions; the "physics", fields, waves, gravity, as defined move effects; the "atoms", being a fragmentary pokemon element. they don't see "quartz, silicates, alumina"; they see rocky pieces of a "ground type" in the ground. and this is natural to them, as it is in the image of a world familiar, and they are far removed from the knowledge of what's outside, by many generations.

pokemon, themselves, are "supernatural" because each pokemon itself is a quantum of their world. it's like if "ice cream" was an atom, and it was six kilograms, ten centimeters long, and had the characteristic physical property of "this is ice cream".

this is why pokemon are also food, why a horseshoe magnet can lay an egg, and why porygon and rotom are - this world is an entity system of likewise models, by which a combination of iterative simulation logic and neural-network-based evolutionary algorithms advance the process of "evolution" to produce or transform items in the virtual world they live in.

what's spooky in the world of pokemon, isn't the pokemon, nor the world; it's the people.

in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

and it does seem like the relationship with humans & Pokemon helping each other out predates the invention of pokeballs so any potential coercion angle wouldn't be there for most of human history
some Pokedex entries mentioning early human Pokemon cooperation
Ultra Moon Growlithe "It has lived alongside humans since ages ago. Its bones have been found in excavations of ruins from the Stone Age."

Scarlet Cyclizar "Apparently Cyclizar has been allowing people to ride on its back since ancient times. Depictions of this have been found in 10,000-year-old murals."

Gogoat Scarlet "It can sense the feelings of others by touching them with its horns. This species has assisted people with their work since 5,000 years ago."

Conkeldurr Black "It is thought that Conkeldurr taught humans how to make concrete more than 2,000 years ago."

and in the Pokemon anime Misty Psyduck wanders out of the Pokeball constantly so it doesn't seem to meaningfully restrict the Pokemons Behavior or movement, Legends Arceus specifies pokeballs work by triggering Pokemons innate ability to shrink themselves so all the pokeballs are really doing is physically holding the Pokemon so they can be more easily moved so it's mostly just a transportation Revolution than a control device

there are some advantages Pokemon acquire by entering a trainer Partnerships they never have to worry about acquiring food or shelter or being eaten by a bigger Pokemon, and Pokemon Center access would give them much faster recovery times in battles so they can get stronger quicker compared to fighting in the wild