Pokémon anime

There may have been a few gold coins seen in one episode, because Meowth was found by islanders who thought it could bring good fortune, even though Meowth was unable to learn Pay Day. Because the islanders forced it to battle other Pokemon, hoping he would learn Pay Day as a result, Jessie and James threw coins out to trick the people into thinking Meowth finally learned it, to save him from further battles.

Thoughts about these from UnintentionallyUnsympathetic.Pokemon?

• The main villain of the Gold & Silver chapter, Pryce, aka the Masked Man. The reader is clearly supposed to find him sympathetic since he lost his two Lapras to a freak accident, and it's made obvious that he truly cares about his Pokémon in general. That doesn't really justify kidnapping children to be forced to work for him, brainwashing a group of criminals, funding a program that forces evolution (which is implied to be painful), and attempting to murder 2 minors. He can easily come across as a huge jerkass because of all the things he did just to reunite with them instead of just accepting a loss that wasn't really his (or anyone else's) fault and doesn't even try to go about it in a less extreme manner. The only mitigating factors are that one chapter shows that he does care about the children he captured but due to his frigid emotional state he can't express this except in ice sculptures, and that he seems to feel guilty about all that he's done, as he attempts to strangle himself after it appears to have all been for nothing.

This sounds like the intentional stuff that he's still portrayed as a villain despite this, and the last part further argues against. Cut it? Or is there unindented reasons he's this/any way to fix the entry?

Did the trainer protagonists see him as a poor misunderstood soul in the end, or a villain with good intentions but went too far?

If it's the former, it counts. If it's the later, it isn't.

Neither. The protagonists pretty much think he's a complete asshole to the very end. Crystal even tells him after they find out his motivations that trying to revive two Pokemon is too petty a goal to remotely justify all the shit he did. His motivation, even though it's sympathetic on the surface, is shown as something he's so obsessed with that he's pretty much become a complete psychopath to literally everyone and everything else except his own Pokemon (and even then he tells Gold that he views even his own Pokemon as tools just to piss him off).

The only even slightly nice thing he does is help save Gold from being dragged into the gap between dimensions with him and that's only at the very, very end of the arc after he's been defeated and his goal partially fulfilled (his Lapras is implied to have been transported to another timeline where its parents survived, but Pryce himself is stuck between dimensions), causing him to finally calm down some and be emotionally affected by the song his friends made for him. The scene of him carving ice statues of the kids he kidnapped and implying he cares about them in his own way comes in a later bonus chapter about two of those kids escaping him because they hate him and their time in his facility being forcibly trained by him.

The only place calling him Unintentionally Unsympathetic could maybe be true is in the later HeartGold/SoulSilver chapters where he comes back and is sort of reformed now and helps the heroes, but even then the heroes don't really like him or want to hang out with him, and the common reaction I've seen from readers is basically "Nah, fuck this guy still. He doesn't deserve to be treated as reformed."

I think this iteration of the character pretty much, for all intents and purposes, is unsympathetic on purpose. I think the only reason they even reformed him is because as the manga started moving on to using antagonists in the games that actually had a greater presence in the plot, and began to become somewhat more faithful adaptations, they reformed most of the eviler portrayals of characters to bring them more in line with the games' versions.

Fun fact, Scott's Thoughts was linked a while ago, and his style of Self-Imposed Challenge often comes with some Running Gags, such as using the Dome Fossil instead of the Helix Fossil or naming Silver with more or less ?s than usual. But his most famous is his inability to identify Venomoth's typing correctly.

It's easy to see that the Flying type was conceived to replace the Bird type, but by the time the Gen I games hit the shelves, Game Freak had already started to spread the Flying type beyond birds. For some strange reason however, Venomoth, whose sprites portray it constantly in flight, was an early example of a flying Pokemon that isn't a Flying type (which is notable when Butterfree, another Bug type which actually is a Flying type, also has prominent feet it can use to land on the ground, whereas Venomoth has no visible way to land). It's all the more jarring that due to a lack of good Bug or Poison moves in that generation, it tended to use Psychic moves when sent out by NPC trainers, including by the resident Psychic master, Sabrina, in Red and Blue only.

Therefore, Scott has misidentified it as a Psychic type, a Flying type, or both ever since he was a child. Because he is sometimes prone to forgetful brain farts while doing his runs, prioritizing the moves of his Pokemon of choice and those of much stronger opponents like the Elite 4 and Champion over certain opponents he may not put much thought into, he often struggled to remember Venomoth is a Bug type and Poison type. Self-aware of his forgetfulness toward Venomoth in particular, he embraced the gag by alluding to Venomoth's Grass typing from the Pokemon Trading Card Game and threw even more incorrect types into the mix, often to the point of editing official media that would prove him wrong for the sake of the joke (such as showing the profiles for Koga's team in Gen II on Bulbapedia, with Venomoth's Poison type replaced with the Fairy type that had yet to be introduced at the time).

Edited by 6f5e4d on Apr 28th 2024 at 4:54:23 AM