Any monster looks several times cooler if it's oozing something

July 20, 2016 6:48 AM

Bogleech (previously) is currently providing in-depth reviews of every. single. Pokémon. Not every Pokémon game - every individual Pokémon. He's up to #374 now. He can also tell you all about the real-world biological organisms behind such Pokémon as Parasect, Weepinbell, and his beloved Gloom, and explain why they are both grosser and more charming than you ever suspected.
posted by showbiz_liz (19 comments total)

Boo, he doesn't have a fond opinion of Eevees or the possible Evolutions!
posted by INFJ at 6:59 AM on July 20, 2016

This morning I tried to imagine what it was like in Nintendo's conference rooms a few months ago. Maybe kinda glum. Maybe some nostalgia for the good old days. Say, whatever happened to our audience for Pokemon? Where did they go? What are they doing now?

Over in the corner, the new guy in a new skinny suit pulls his nose up out of his smartphone and says "hunh? wah?" and the room fills with the blinding light of an idea.
posted by notyou at 7:03 AM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Boo, he doesn't have a fond opinion of Eevees or the possible Evolutions!

What I've been loving about this series is, he so clearly gravitates toward the 'gross' monsters and doesn't dig the 'prettier' ones, like Ponyta and Ninetails and Eevee, that I tend to like. But he's totally chill about it, and acknowledges that while a certain monster might not be his cup of tea, it's awesome that there's something in Pokemon for everyone. It's frankly kind of adorable.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:07 AM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is great. This is perfect morning-coffee reading. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

Bulbasaur's my starter of choice and I never made the toad connection, which is kinda cool.
posted by curious nu at 7:10 AM on July 20, 2016

As a trainer who selects my A-team based on this kind of personal-affinity-based-criteria vs. a min/max-y, best-base-stats approach, this is the best and I love it so, so much. Heck, I even end up eschewing type variety altogether sometimes, favoring (much like the person writing these, it seems) Grass/Bug/Poison types in particular. Sometimes you just want to use Serperior and Victreebell and Venomoth and Parasect and Vulcarona and Vespiquen, ya know? Vulnerability to certain types can be countered to an extent by other means - that's what secondary types are for, and I'm not above over-leveling a bit for where I'm at, if it means I get to use my guys.
posted by Ennis Tennyone at 7:14 AM on July 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

As a trainer who selects my A-team based on this kind of personal-affinity-based-criteria

This is why I have a deep and abiding love for Abomasnow. It is a tree and also a yeti. Weak to, like, 50 kinds of attacks? PISH POSH I SAY.

Tree yeti.
posted by curious nu at 7:19 AM on July 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

My top ten is totally dominated by guys that are typically deemed useless for "serious" competition, but are so awesome that, like, how could you even be having any fun if you are not using them?

See: Aromatisse. You're not gonna grind the competition into dust, but *look* at that saucy little dude! Also, Froslass.

I gave up on playing in the random online matchups, because you're up against the same 10 or so pokemon over and over and over. Not fun! I've ended up lately not battling at all and just focusing on collecting and doing stuff like setting up theme teams, where you try to make a reasonably balanced team with a diverse moveset. My goth squad is awesome (Noivern, Gothitelle, Chandlure, Gourgeist, Umbreon, Empoleon)! I managed to get 14 move types covered in 6 guys, and puzzling out how to do that was waaaaaay more fun than fighting strangers' Garchomps 50,000 times.
posted by Ennis Tennyone at 7:53 AM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

When I saw the title there was a split second where I honestly wondered if this was the new post for day 3 of the RNC.
posted by usonian at 8:01 AM on July 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

Really enjoying this. I'm up to Abra, which was pretty much my main 'mon when playing through Blue. In fact, I'm pretty sure I used Abra as a forum avatar for a lot of years, which I'd completely forgotten about until I was looking at its picture. It's such a weird little thing, only knows Teleport to start, pain in the ass to catch. Then it evolves and just wrecks everything in the first game, due to Psychic being.. kinda overpowered in the beginning. I don't know if it still is, I haven't played a Pokemon game in some years.
posted by curious nu at 8:03 AM on July 20, 2016

" I guess that's just how horses are. The world is trained to think of them as beautiful and majestic, but they really kinda look like a human skin stretched over a giant weird dog. "

TRUTH
posted by curious nu at 8:13 AM on July 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

As an elementary schooler or almost pre-teen, I remember feeling weird about Bellossum when it first came out, for two reasons. One, its evolution and design was unnatural, because all the evolutions should match, so Bellossum should have been an extra gross Vileplume instead, for continuity. Second, because it just seemed too "pretty" and it was wrong, like the cousin that was graceful and you were supposed to learn hatred towards superior females. Something about the toxic gender roles that I picked up from the media taught me interpret Bellossum as a representative of "clean, normative feminity" and made me femmephobic.

Yes I am serious, because as a kid, only "boys could be gross" and therefore Gloom was a "gross Pokemon", aka boyish, that I didn't quite recognize as a flower, since boys are not associated with flowers. I couldn't be a gross girl, and that made me confused. (Now I'm just a non-binary person that shifts between hygiene states, freedom!) Now I think they can both happily co-exist, but eesh!

Gender binary and social roles really fuck everything up, including Pokemon.
posted by yueliang at 8:24 AM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I’m glad that this person has a cool and thorough project, even if I disagree with their aesthetic sensibilities.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:27 AM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Gender binary and social roles really fuck everything up, including Pokemon.

The author mentions several times how various Pokemon that looked female (i.e., skirts, jewelry, etc) are not explicitly gendered, at least in the original Pokedex. I especially dig this line about Misdreavus (emphasis in original):

I appreciate the fact that, unlike Jynx, Misdreavus are not presumed to be exclusively female just because they have little dresses, flowing hair and pink pearls, or even the fact that banshees in mythology are always the ghosts of women. These are monsters, after all. There's no reason for them to be bound by human gender norms, especially considering there's no reason for humans to be bound by their own gender norms.

posted by zombieflanders at 10:57 AM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

That’s interesting to me, because my read of that image is “of course this pokemon is female, it has a dress and pearls on, I mean come on, we’ve thrown an ‘it’ on top to muddy the waters, but you get what we’re saying here.”

Semiotics!
posted by Going To Maine at 11:11 AM on July 20, 2016

There are a ton of gender-interesting pokemon, e.g. Machamp (a first gen) looks like this whether male or female (although males are more common, being 3/4 of the pop. of all the types in its evolutionary line). I mentioned personal fave Aromatisse above. Mr. Mime can be either. Azurill can change upon evolving into Marrill. Plenty are genderless, and not just mechanical types like Magneton - see Keldeo or Reshiram. Of course, you also have the Nidoran line, as discussed by Bogleech here, where the female side of the evolutionary line ands up with boob plates.

This is absolutely not to dismiss yueliang's comment! Gender and pokemon is an excellent topic that means a lot to people, and it is especially interesting in that its a place where a lot of kids are gonna start forming ideas and also basically I would be cool with just talking about pokemon all the time.
posted by Ennis Tennyone at 11:41 AM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Any monster looks several times cooler if it's oozing something"

Dark Souls in a nutshell.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:49 AM on July 20, 2016

This has been fun to go through. A lot of these I'd forgotten about. Also, did they really make a Seel and a Spheal? That is some poor localization right there. =/ I assume the original names were suitably different.

Looking forward to the next generation, which I think is the last one I played.
posted by curious nu at 7:20 AM on July 21, 2016

Are you kidding me? Spheal is a SPHERICAL SEAL. It is possibly the most perfect name.

Seel, though - yeah. That's no good.
posted by Ennis Tennyone at 12:56 PM on July 21, 2016

I love the tangent on Ditto breeding:

How often must this even happen in the wild? How many species are sustained almost entirely by Ditto? Do these other pokemon know that's what they're mating with? Do they care?

It's already weird that a pokemon's father can be such a wildly different species, but it's even weirder that a pokemon's mother can be a Ditto. Ditto can perfectly gestate an entirely different species in its body, apparently carrying no Ditto characteristics whatsoever. Does it ever do this to humans? Are there PEOPLE who find out their mom was just a Ditto? Has a Ditto ever wound up having to raise a human baby out in the wild?

This is old-school quality internet content. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
posted by Gordafarin at 5:20 AM on July 23, 2016