• RION [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    72·
    10 months ago

    The difference is Pokemon makes it clear that the Pokemon enjoy battling and do it voluntarily

    Are these the same people who accept JK Rowling’s “the house elves are slaves but they like it so it’s cool and even the idea of emancipation is a joke” with no further introspection?

    • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      32·
      10 months ago

      Taking my Charmander down to the Pokemon center to get electroshock treatment for her drapetomania and then trauma-bonding afterwards with pokemon treats that are basically like heroin

    • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      19·
      10 months ago

      You would think, but in the lore Pokemon do just casually form fight clubs and have small wars. In addition, something about teaming up with humans allows them to unlock power boosts or just having access to a coach. Granted, the levels of intelligence and similarity to human psychology can vary from Mon to Mon. One example is that Basculin in the lore is basically just a violent trout, making it less of a moral concern to many in-universe gourmands. Meanwhile other Pokemon like Alakazam or Orangaru is effectively a human with magic powers.

    • Great_Leader_Is_Dead@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      I think the difference is this, JK wanted to write a serious, complex fantasy world that touched on actual real world issues like fascism and racism, but sucked shit at world building and kept dropping random crap in there that she then later had to scramble to justify. Examples being easily accessible time travel, and institutionalized chattel slavery. A more clever fantasy author could have dreamt up a race of fey creatures who enjoyed doing favors for humans in exchange for little gifts or something, but then greedy humans abused the relationship, and while these fey beings still wanted to be helpful to humans they objected to the ones who grossly exploited their natural kindness. But JK ain’t smart enough for that, she just put a fully sentient, basically the same mentally as a human, slave character, who is explicitly called a slave, in her story to make a villain seem more evil and then didn’t want to deal with the implications world-building wise.

      Pokémon was just like “hey a game where you collect cute little monsters and have them do little battles would be fun”. Then people tried to write serious stories in the setting and people realized that any real world allegory of this were kinda fucked. Buy Pokémon has never had very robust or serious world building, and is the work of a variety of authors, not the sole vision of one writer. It’s in sort, kind of a mess, so trying to do a serious breakdown of it is a bit of a folly, since it’s design is resistant to that sort of thing, it’s a silly world designed to sell fun toys and games. We can do these little nerdy deep dives for shits and giggles but we’re not really deconstructing anything serious.

  • Acute_Engles [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    59·
    10 months ago

    I’m sure the godly and legendary creatures I keep in a capsule in a bank are feeling good about it. Oh you’re the god of space? Enjoy the luxury ball it’s the only thing you’ll ever see again

  • KittyBobo [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    52·
    10 months ago

    That always bugged me with the Pokémon defense. “Oh, but they like that im the master and tell them to do things. We’re all friends, just a big family!” Is the exact argument you would use if you were subjugating others but didn’t want to feel bad about it.

            • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              15·
              10 months ago

              But pets are still absolutely subjugated. They are literally owned by humans, are not free and have no agency over their own lives.

              The point is that everyone here going “huh this is just what they said about slaves” are completely ignoring that we have pets, which we love a lot (at least i know i love my dog very much) but they are nevertheless subjugated and treated as lesser. Our dog is not allowed on the couch. Sure, I don’t make my dog fight other dogs, but I am still denying her her freedom and she is my legal property. She would not survive in the wild and she loves me a lot as well, but is that not what they said about slaves? Either way, she is not given the choice. What are the ethics of this relationship?

              Pokemon is a nonsensical setting that can’t decide whether its creatures are more like animals or whether they are sapient, but I think comparing Pokemon to pets is much more appropriate than comparing them to human servants like the house elves from Harry Potter.

              Either way, you do not have to hand it to Palworld, it’s obnoxious, Happy Tree Friends-esque edgelord shit.

              Edit: To clarify: I’m not saying “Keeping pets is ethically good and therefore Pokemon is ethically good”. I think you could argue both, the point is that we shouldn’t pretend like we treat all living things as equal and that, if you assume subjugation to be mistreatment, it is still very evidently possible to sincerely love something you’re subjugating and treating as lesser. Morality and emotions are complicated and don’t make sense a lot of the time.

              • WithoutFurtherBelay@hexbear.netEnglish
                10·
                10 months ago

                She would not survive in the wild and she loves me a lot as well, but is that not what they said about slaves?

                The difference is that they were wrong about the slaves, because we didn’t have giant bricks of steel flying around that are just a little too tall to see them (and also slaves are also human beings and functionally identical in all capabilities to their masters$

            • BovineUniversity@hexbear.netEnglish
              5·
              10 months ago

              Why should animals be forced to live within your limits though, even if you treat them ‘well’? You’re trapping them in homes or even cages, they have basically no agency.

              • WithoutFurtherBelay@hexbear.netEnglish
                14·
                10 months ago

                Because if they get outside they’ll get killed by a car and/or fuck up the environment

                Pets SHOULDN’T exist, but that isn’t fixable by having individuals throw “their” animals outside, it doesn’t fix anything and causes more suffering

                So I’m not “against pets” any more than someone is “against food” because they got it from a capitalist grocery store

                • BovineUniversity@hexbear.netEnglish
                  4·
                  10 months ago

                  Oh I’m not saying pets should all be euthanized immediately or anything, just that the pet and pet-breeding industry should be phased out with the goal of animals existing almost solely in the wild in the future.

            • Great_Leader_Is_Dead@hexbear.netEnglish
              3·
              10 months ago

              but again most people don’t do that

              Billions of people across the world use animals for labor, before the Industrial Revolution most people did. In much of the underdeveloped world you often have to use animal labor to survive. And often people who exploit animal labor feel genuine affection for the animals, plenty of people who use dogs for more utilitarian means still love them, plenty of farmers care for the donkey that hauls their produce to market.

      • EdelethIsBae [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        10 months ago

        that would be a completely ridiculous struggle session to have, no one is against banning pets, unless you’re a bastard landlord or have justifiable reasons due to allergies (but even then its usually ‘keep them out of this area’ not ‘ban people from having animal friends’)

        so hexbear will stay free of such things

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          17·
          10 months ago

          We co-evolved with dogs over the course of 40,000 years. in so far as the temr “natural” means anything, it is natural for dogs and humans to live together in close cooperation. there’s a theory going that humans and dogs (and domesticated agricultural plants) co-domesticated each other and that our close relationship with dogs (and wheat) is why humans seem to share many traits found in domesticated animals but not wild animals.

          • GinAndJuche@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            10 months ago

            Malazan plays with this idea by claiming giant fantasy dogs that work for the god of death protected early humans and we kinda evolved as a result. or something like that, its been years.

    • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      10 months ago

      As a massive Pokemon fan, Pokemon’s lore is just straight unhinged. They even say Pokemon used to live as equals to humans, and some would even have romantic involvement with humans. And GF expect me to believe that they want to be in the ball?

    • showmustgo [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      10 months ago

      Ok that was great. I love when someone puts an inexplicable feeling into concrete terms. Once with this DE stuff and twice with the the banger within a banger when op calls to stop calling everything fascism. Thanks 🙏

    • Raebxeh@hexbear.netEnglish
      19·
      10 months ago

      Without reading (I am a staunch antiintellectual, yuck), is diegetic essentialism the boiling down of a text into strictly what happens within the text and ignoring the fact that it’s humans who consume the text and that that process can create meaning beyond that of the literal text?

    • WithoutFurtherBelay@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      I’ve read this. It really does not work in this context. Nobody is defending or genuinely attacking Pokémon due to its incidental inclusion of cockfighting. What we are doing is defending Palworld, because it’s implicitly referencing this sort of fucked up aspect of Pokémon when you think of it too much, as a shitpost.

      Not to mention the fact that there is genuine cultural analysis to be made about the fact that we just… have games about collecting sentient creatures and putting them into tiny spaces and don’t comment about it at all.

  • jaeme@hexbear.netEnglish
    39·
    10 months ago

    The main series pokemon games have a move called Frustration which increases damage the less friendship the user has with their pokemon.

    Why does this move exist in a game about friendship and loving the creatures you capture against their will? soviet-hmm

    This problem could just be solved by making pokemon not real creatures in the world but just spirits. Unfortunately, it seems that pokemon society is not vegan so it’s also canon that people just eat pokemon.

  • abc [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    38·
    10 months ago

    I’m gonna brutalize one Pokemon for every dumbass comment in this thread. Sorry comrades but I’ve already stomped a Maushold to death and that’s basically 4 pokemon in 1

  • EdelethIsBae [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    37·
    10 months ago

    also the whole debate over this shit is basically a veiled form of the vegan struggle session so lets just stop pretending we’re concerned for the rights of pixels in the shape of an orange dragon

    chill out, people want to have fake monsters fight each other

  • Zezzy [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    35·
    10 months ago

    SMT negotiations are by far my favorite monster-collecting methods. Just equal parts philosophy, flirtation, and gibberish as they vibe check you.

  • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    10 months ago

    Pokemon is cockfighting, Mario massacres Goombas and turns by the hundreds in any given game and we know from Paper Mario they’re fully sentient and about equal to human intelligence, the star fox team are a PMC, Samus has blown up 3 planets, maybe more ans wiped out 2 species, sorta 3 if you count Evil Beak or whatever from Dread, he was likely the last Chozo. None of this shit really makes any sense and it’s pretty senseless to go thst deep into it. Especially if you’re being serious.

  • ElChapoDeChapo [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    10 months ago

    Hot take: game is fun, not great but it’s early acess so it could get better

    Honestly feels more like the Pokémon anime than the games in many ways but in a good way, little things like letting out my fire pal as a light source while mining at night feels better than anything gamefreak has done in the last 20 years

    • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      10 months ago

      Honestly feels more like the Pokémon anime than the games in many ways

      Honestly, this is why I think all the complaints about it being edgy and stuff are overblown.
      As easy as it is to call Palworld “pokemon with guns”, it’s really just pokemon. JUST pokemon. It’s Pokemon as a 3d openworld adventure game, instead of abstracting through turn orders and menus. It’s pokemon where you can do all the things implied or outright stated in the official games. It’s not pokemon with guns, it’s pokemon that lets you use the guns.
      If they do it well they could end up making the best pokemon game in terms of immersion, they’ve just stopped saying that being the main character makes what you do inherently good.

  • Sinistar [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    10 months ago

    PoKeMoN iS aBoUt CoCk FiGhTiNg is baby’s first edgy media interpretation. There are multiple storylines over the decades of the franchises existence that deal with Pokemon not wanting to fight and they all conclude with the message that you shouldn’t force them to fight - and in the games it’s stated that when they “attack” you, it’s because they want to test you to see if you’re good enough to be their trainer.

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      42·
      10 months ago

      “The author wrote the text so the victims are happy with their lot, so criticism of their treatment is invalid” is also an immature media interpretation, and worth about as much as “All characters depicted in this work are 18 or older even if stated otherwise”.

      As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the house elves in Harry Potter are explicitly written as content with enslavement, but everybody sees that as transparently problematic. What’s the difference?

      It’s fine to like pokemon (I liked/still kinda like it) but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the iffy nature of the premise

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      10 months ago

      Technically pokemon is about Japense kids catching goliath beetles and making them fight, which afaik mostly involves them flipping each other over.

      Like this is what inspired pokemon. Japanese kids catch beetles and make them fight. There’s no “the curtains are blue” here. It’s a pastime to catch beetles, carry them around in little containers, and have them fight each other.

    • BovineUniversity@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      The small bugs, birds, and mammals that I obliterate with my god-dragons after I stomp through their homes are just testing me and are actually having a really good time!

    • iridaniotter [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      Actually, Pokémon is about cock fighting. The original sprites even had whips. The problem is, it became so popular that they started writing actual storylines, so they had to come up with bullshit to cover for this completely unserious world they’ve built.