Manly Guys Doing Manly Things

It's in color now, and that pokeball energy is looking cosmic as fuck.

Pokemon is very dark, but not really grimdark. If that makes any sense. Anyway, this comic was hilarious. Jared does kind of have a point that the Gengar wasn't very well trained if it didn't even stick around. You'd think that pokemon given out as promotional gifts would at least be trained to stay near the person giving them out.

Pokemon is big on the Fridge Horror. I think we have a specific trope for that (Crapsaccharine World, maybe), but I'm too lazy to check. The point is, Pokemon is presented as a friendly world based on self-improvement and working together and stuff, but when you think about it too hard, you start noticing things. Like the horrible origins of a variety of Ghost-types (one is explicitly the soul of a dead human), the whole moral question of mind-controlling animals to fight for you, and so on.

They go out of their way to justify some of these things (apparently the only wild Pokemon who attack you want to get caught, or something), but the Fridge Horror is still there.

edited 31st Oct '14 2:17:37 PM by Discar

"Mi-"

No, no. I'm not gonna work that up again.

Yes, there's some dark stuff. Plenty of Pokemon dying (hell, just about every game has some graveyard filled with people grieving over their partners), enough people who abuse Pokemon to make people believe humans incompatible with them entirely when shown the right spin, kidnapping...

Pet cemetaries are also a thing that exists, so I never really considered pokemon graveyards to be that dark in and of itself.

Yeah, I mean, death is a thing. Pokemon graveyards aren't really any inherently darker than human graveyards.

It depends what it says on the tombstones... eg. 'Died peacefully...' or 'Horribly squished with a Magikarp....'

What I meant is that it is a thing that takes Pokemon somewhat out of the "go on a fun adventure with your beam-shooting pets!" level it usually operates on.

"Here lies Pikachu. Thunderbolt was his great Electric attack... until he got Ground out by a MAROWAK!

The graveyard is dark because it exists in an ostensibly light-hearted series about cockfighting. The entire Pokemon world is founded on the principle of putting leashes on wild animals and forcing them to maul each other for your amusement. What keeps this from being horrific is that the story goes to great lengths to exposit on how you and your tamed monsters are bestest best friends, and they're totally loyal and love you, and the violence never has serious consequences so it's really more like a game than a savage, bloody brawl between ravenous slave-animals.

But then there's the goddamn graveyard where dead Pokemon are buried, which calls attention to the consequences that the fun, kid-friendly violence isn't supposed to have. The writers of the anime tried very hard to use bells, whistles, and funtastic morals to keep kids away from the unnerving Fridge Logic of the franchise, but the game developers absolutely love shining a spotlight on it. It's a happy funhouse of joy with a bloody carcass stuffed into a closet; you probably wouldn't even notice it's there, if the game developers didn't keep going, "Hey kids, check this out," and opening the goddamn closet.

EDIT: Oh, and also there's people possessed by the spirits of the dead, spooky-ass music that comes right out of nowhere and chills players to their soul, and the vengeful spirit of a Marowak that died an awful, gruesome death - explicitly murdered by Team Rocket while they were at the tower harvesting Cubone skulls - that defies even the game's internal logic by disallowing players to capture it.

edited 1st Nov '14 7:32:22 AM by TobiasDrake

<Moderator cap on>

Ahem, folks, this isn't a Pokemon thread.

Pokemanly Guys Do Pokemanly Things

I don't really see anyone complaining, and it's not like we're far off topic.

Someone did complain about it, privately. And from what I can tell you are pretty far off topic.

Alright, well I hope somebody has something else to talk about, then.

We're off topic, but less so than an identical conversation would have been say, last week.

So anyone reading Platinum Black? I forgot to.

That's even less on-topic than talking about Pokemon.

I guess the thread just dies until the next strip comes out, because that's what happens when people object to a discussion taking place but offer no suggestions as to what discussion can replace it: the flow of conversation is disrupted and everyone participating trails off to do other things.

edited 1st Nov '14 3:17:28 PM by TobiasDrake

x2 Not really. They're both made by coelasquid.

Pokemon is made by Coelasquid? I had no idea.

Still a completely different strip. At least the rational implications of actions in Pokemon was part of the subject of this week's MGDMT strip.

I haven't bothered with Coelasquid's other comic at all since the promised subject matter is the kind of think I tend to try to stay away from.

edited 2nd Nov '14 12:38:33 AM by TheSpaceJawa

It hasn't updated since August anyway.

I've been reading it. It's not bad so far, though there's not much of it.