do you think scientists in the pokemon universe call moves by something other than their common names? do you think Blast Burn is known in the scientific community is infernum Juniperii or some shit. theres maybe not a reason for them to, moves seem to have open-and-shut ontologies rather than the messiness that binomial nomenclature seeks to avoid. but it feels weird to imagine a paper about fucking Zappy Zap
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in reply to @bigstuffedcat's post:
some bonus chapter of the pokemon manga ages and ages ago had a poster that said "charizard" / "lizardon" on it and a line of dialogue that was basically "yeah that call pokemon other things in different countries haha" so idk probably
Here's a question:
Is the pokémon move ontology as open-and-shut as all that, or is that an artefact of the presentation of the moves in the games?
We know that over the course of the "modern" series (i.e. the games with mechanical continuity, gens III through IX), moves do change!
For a very straightforward example, consider Thief. Up to and including Gen V, it has 10 PP and 40 power, from Gen VI onwards, it has 25 and 60. Is this change, within the fiction of the world, real, or is it just a game mechanical tweak? If the change is real within the fiction of the world, how is it real? Are they two different (but very similar) moves? Are they the same move, but changes in pokémon sport science has improved its use?
Further to this, there's another salient question: Are moves real, or comprehensively an artefact of presentation? Are moves simply numbers that get attached to things pokémon can do? Is there such a thing as "Tackle", or is the fact just that lots of pokémon can throw themselves at other pokémon with a relatively consistent (between different species of pokémon) degree of power, and that gets called Tackle?
Much to consider.
i think type changes are pretty weird, like why did my clefable suddenly stop being exploded by close combats
Yeah one of the things that's honestly compelling about Pokemon to me is the fact that we can't know whether it's a ludicized account of a "real" world. Like I have shitposted before that the normal type is constructed propaganda meant to legitimize the Pokemon Professor and their institution, but I still have to square that with the fact that zigzagoon consistently doesn't take damage from lick. is the normal type "real", or are we playing a game that's absorbed the philosophy of the world it's emulating, in the same way that domino theory is mechanically real in Twilight Struggle? much to consider
I spent a bunch of time thinking about this over the course of two long walks, and I think I've come to understand pokémon better:
First of all, most people in the pokémon universe, including the player, the player character, and most NPCs you meet, operate on, like, at best middle school pokémonology. They are as familiar with pokémon as we as players are, through a model of reality very similar to the ludic layer. They know the types we know, moves, that kind of stuff.
Then you have the underlying reality of pokémon, which is almost certainly way messier than that. For "the Normal issue" in particular, my belief is that Normal is, in most important ways, "real", but it exists on a spectrum between Normal and Dark. They're pretty similar types in matchups, there's a lot of overlap in movesets, multiple species have convergences (Meowth line ~= Purrloin line, Sentret line ~= Poochyena line) or regional variations (Meowth ~= Alolan Meowth, Zigzagoon ~= Galarian Zigzagoon, Rattata ~= Alolan Rattata) that straddle the barrier, and they are both weak to fighting and immune to ghost, their defining matchup traits.
In general, types aren't "real", but they're a useful abstraction, although you obviously have to have researchers looking into what the heck is up with Freeze Dry, for example, or what the hell "Scrappy" actually is, and how it interacts with, for example, Odor Sleuth.
everything i've seen about pokemon tells me pokescientists will absolutely write a paper about zappy zap and not think a single thing about it. this is the universe where the horrendous space kablooie won