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?
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
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.
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.
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?
Literally a pro slavery argument…
“The slaves got free housing and learned important job skills!”
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
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.
The curtin is only blue sometimes
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.