A week or so ago, I was feeling nostalgic for my old Pokémon games, so I pulled out my old copy of Pokémon White, reset the game, and played through the main storyline.
Things I've noticed (spoilers for BW and BW2 follow):
Child!me was really bad at Pokémon. I basically just kept whichever Pokémon happened to be the highest level ones I had in my team, and if that meant randomly putting in a wild 'mon with a terrible moveset, so be it. I basically didn't consider type advantages at all. I'm pretty sure I wiped to Elesa like five times or so before I swapped in a ground type and manage to beat her, and the lesson I took from that was "wow, the Pokémon I added was only one level higher than the one I swapped it out for, amazing how much difference that makes!"
The "good guys'" arguments in the game are ... really bad. Like, I agree that they're correct about the empirical fact "is catching/training/battling Pokémon abusive," but there are a number of conversations that essentially go:
Team Plasma: have you considered that you're making Pokémon suffer, and that's bad? "Good" guy: I think it's important to consider different perspectives and let people make up their own mind on whether Pokémon suffering is bad! not everything is black and white!
Subtext I absolutely did not notice when I initially played through: Alder is really bad at his job! The Elite Four more or less tells you that he's abandoning his actual job duties to wander around Unova being sad that one of his Pokémon died several years ago. When N beats him, he randomly gets really upset about it and starts insulting him. No wonder by the sequels he's been replaced.
One thing I'd remembered as not being explicit until the second game was that outside of N, there are plenty of Team Plasma members who actually genuinely want to help Pokémon and were not abusive. I was remembering wrong -- this is pretty explicit in BW too.
If you do not reblog this, you are in fact lying.
Imagining a story in your head:
Writing down the story:
So this is a really funny post and I realize I’m missing the point but Latin didn’t have a “w.”
friendly reminder that ivlivs caesar is problematic for he attempts to pass legislation in the senate that does not benefit the eqvites and the optimates, vwv
I didn’t think about it that way, but you’re right! That sort of indoctrination is clearly starting to have an effect on the vulnerable children at my school. My social circle has MULTIPLE so-called relationships that involve one boy and one girl, and this sort of propaganda is why they think it’s okay to label themselves like that. You would think that they would have learned after our group’s last one-boy-one girl “relationship” broke up that this lifestyle will only ever end in unhappiness, but then they look at our school curriculum and it confuses them. Honestly, controversial topics like heterosexuality ought to be left out of the school environment altogether. When we bring things like this into the school situation, it just sets up our children for unhealthy relationships.
omfg so today I saw a man and a woman holding hands in public, i mean i don’t have anything against heterosexuality but don’t flaunt it in front of me, think of the kids omfg
Does it bother anyone else that there are parts of your life you don’t remember? You have done and said things that you don’t even know about anymore. That means you don’t even have the right perception of yourself because you don’t even fully know who you are. However, something that you’ve forgotten about could be a prominent memory in somebody else’s mind. It trips me out.
Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”
I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.
I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”
Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.
Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.
It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.
It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.
Too Like the Lightning is now out free as an ebook for the next three days (ends midnight, March 23rd) through Tor! So if you’re curious what all this is about, (like me) picked up a physical copy but would still like to have an ebook, or for any other reason want a free ebook, check it out!
Edit: link.