DreamsOfMoth

Moth

@DreamsOfMoth

meow

Moth ❤(or Cirrus 💚) Trans, 18+
A shapeshifter? An alien? Maybe a slime?

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DreamsOfMoth
@DreamsOfMoth
armormodekeeg
@armormodekeeg
TalenLee
@TalenLee

pokemon worldbuilding is something audiences back assward their way into making worse

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.

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in reply to @TalenLee's post:

hewhoispale
@hewhoispale

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?

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chiaki747
@chiaki747

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?

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felicia
@felicia

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.

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Librus
@Librus

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!

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jeroknite
@jeroknite

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).

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Librus
@Librus

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?"

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rainwolf
@rainwolf

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

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

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.

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in reply to @TalenLee's post:

hat-desu
@hat-desu

Framing it this way, you could even argue that certain villainous teams in the series directly mimic real-world problems that explicitly don't exist in the pokemon world!

The "this is just cockfighting" crowd is Team Plasma's whole deal - an intentional lack of understanding of the agency that Pokemon have for some misguided human-centric assumptions.

The "children have access to powerful tools" crowd is directly addressed by Team Rocket - in a world where technology itself and the means of living are defined by Pokemon and available even to children, they wanted to steal and monopolize them for profit.

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