SaneAmongInsane said:
The Big O.
Everyone in the universe is just trying to carve out a slice of existence.... And it can never be destroyed because it just keeps rebooting.
Kpt._Rob said:
I really don't know why anyone would choose any option other than Pokemon. That world is, in the most literal sense imaginable, heaven. A charming place, filled with delightful creatures. I know people like to come in and ironically read a sense of darkness into it (what with the whole capturing animals and forcing them to fight based economy) but that's because they're cynical people who have lost their sense of childish wonder. The pokemon and humans in the show clearly love each other and are having fun and meaningful experiences, and it's always those people who are exceptions to that rule (IE their Pokemon actually are enslaved, and don't want to do what they say) that are the bad guys.
But I wouldn't even really want to be a trainer (IE: someone who does nothing but running around battling). That whole world... every single job is so delightful. It all revolves around pokemon, and you could just go through your day to day life with your adorable best friend. It's such a charmed world too. Have you ever seen a homeless person in Pokemon? Nope. Not once. Or if you did, they do it by choice, and just wander around exploring the world, again, with their adorable friend. That life would be so charming and perfect. Why would anyone pick anything else? There is no other appropriate answer.
They're shown eating meat. The Pokedex entry for Farfetch'd talks about how tasty it is.
I'm not cynical, there is clearly a fucked up thing going on in the PokeWorld
Only when you apply the logic of our world to it. At the very least, this much can be said, whatever flaws it might have, it's a much happier world than the one we live in. Animals get eaten here, and animals get eaten there. And if they're only eating Fartetch'd, that's fine by me. And there are some Pokemon which eat humans too, the entry for Litwick on one of its cards, for instance, says that it lures humans to feed off their life energy. So it's not a one way street here.
But that's just cycle of life stuff. The big cynical criticism people make is of what, to us, reads as essentially a dog fighting based economy. That's the part that I'm saying is an invalid interpretation. If you read it that way, then the Pokemon world is a much worse place to live than our world. But I'm saying that the contextual evidence provided by the shows and the games seems to indicate to me that this isn't the case.
The Pokemon world is filled with charm, whimsy, and delight, and neither you nor anyone else will convince me any differently.