Tag: about the author

In honor of pride month, are there any pokemon who are more prone to chosing same sex mates? Or do you know of any gym leaders/professors/champions/pc managers who are lgbt?

Regarding the latter, I must say quite a few of the figures you’ve mentioned are either closeted or straight, so I’m either not at liberty to out them or can’t include them here for obvious reasons.

At the very least, though, my colleagues on the storage system’s staff and I are quite happily open. Among the core developers (that is, the administrators of Kanto/Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, and Alola), Lanette is the only one who’s both straight and cisgendered. Her sister and Molayne are aroace, Bebe is bisexual, Celio is gay, Cassius is pansexual and polyamorous at that, and I am an unfortunate cross between panromantic and asexual. Amanita is excluded here because she hasn’t really explored her sexuality or gender yet. Neither our circle nor her sister are putting any pressure on her to do so, though, but we’ll fully support her when she’s ready. In addition, Molayne is genderfluid (their pronouns are he/him and they/them, incidentally), but we also have a number of trans and nonbinary administrators among the non-core developers. Ingrid of London, for example, who seems to be a fan favorite,  is trans.

Among the gym leaders and Elite Four, as I’ve said, a number of them are either straight or closeted. When it comes to outed members, there is quite an extensive list. For the sake of ease, allow me to only give a few examples. For one, Valerie of Kalos is trans and also aroace, but Jasmine and Will, likewise trans, identify as bisexual and straight, respectively. Burgh, meanwhile, identifies as genderfluid (pronouns are also he/him and they/them). Erika and Sabrina both identify as wlw, although Sabrina is asexual as well. On the other hand, Morty is openly gay, as are Brawly, Wallace, and Grant.

As for Elite Four and Champions, I admit I can’t say for the vast majority of them (they keep their identities rather secret due to our unfortunately backwards media, as you may be aware). However, Steven Stone is openly asexual which … is perhaps because of some rather fascinating rumors about him. Quite honestly, he’s a man after my own heart—far more interested in science than more human pursuits. Of course, his main interests lie in geology rather than in pokémonology, but I don’t judge him for it. I just lament that it’s simply never meant to be.

(Bill, is that really necessary? The media has a field day with you on the daily as it is… —LH

It is 100% necessary. —Bill)

As for pokémon, few of them share our concepts of gender and sexuality, so mated pairs of all possible orientations are not at all unusual in the pokémon world. Wild jynx populations, for example, are known to form same-sex couples and use nearby pokémon (sometimes found well outside the jynx’s home cave systems) to fertilize their smoochum eggs. Even when healthy populations of compatible male pokémon are presented to jynx, they often prefer the company of their own species or female representatives of the male’s. The tyrogue family, sawk, throh, and the bounsweet line seem to be the same way, and froslass, upon evolution, also gravitate towards other froslass and female glalie, even if they displayed a preference towards either gender as snorunt. (Researchers aren’t entirely sure why froslass do that, unfortunately.)

In short, I suppose one can say that should you be LGBT, readers, rest assured you are far, far from alone.

When I think about it, ‘accidentally’ turning yourself into a pokemon via a teleporter related accident seems like a great way to get out of watching Binaclebob Trapezoidpants.

You would think so, anonymous, but unfortunately, the way my partner administers Binaclebob Trapezoidpants makes it unfortunately difficult to get out of watching it.

For those curious, my account has a rather … unique feature due to a few prior incidents in which I may or may not have been found staring at a certain meowth-themed website for hours on end after late-night coding sessions. To put it as simply as possible, this feature is essentially a failsafe or an emergency button: whenever the other administrators agree that I may need a break, they lock my administrator’s panel until I fulfill certain requirements to prove I’m rested enough to resume work.

Or at least that’s what it’s supposed to do. In practice, the other administrators mostly use it to make me watch children’s cartoons of questionable taste whenever I make somewhat equally questionable decisions.

This, of course, is a tangent, but that’s just to say that if anything, being trapped in the body of something too short to reach the mouse (and thus control when the videos begin and end) actually makes things worse.

Again … not that I have any experience with this whatsoever.

Hey Bill, what would happen if someone could transform into a pokemon? What would it be like? Do you retain your intelligence? Do you get all the pokemons instincts? Do you risk being caught? Will other pokemon think your one of them?

I feel like it would be an exceedingly bad idea if I responded to this, but … fine.

As a disclaimer, I’d imagine that there are a number of ways one could transform into a pokémon, and each one may carry its own unique … consequences. For example, if you transformed via extreme psychic exertion, immediate resurrection, or just plain magic like some folklore and urban myths about the origins of certain pokémon imply, that would be entirely different than, say, accidentally merging yourself with your test clefairy via a teleportation experiment gone horribly awry. Which, as we all know, I would know nothing about.

Regardless, I’ll do my best to keep my speculation as general as possible.

For the most part, the one thing humans have over pokémon is will. It’s why pokémon turn to us for training; we’re simply inordinately tenacious. For this reason, I’d imagine—because I certainly don’t have experience in this matter whatsoever—that if a human were to become a pokémon, then yes, they would retain their intelligence. Even in situations where (hypothetically speaking) it would actually be more like the human and the pokémon were sharing a body, it’s very likely that the human would largely be in control during those situations, due to their generally stronger will. I’d imagine that you would still hear your pokémon’s thoughts, but they would simply be more or less another voice in your head that would be somewhat distracting in your efforts to undo such an unfortunate situation, but it wouldn’t necessarily be unmanageable.

You could, of course, also gain a pokémon’s instincts at first because the entire situation would be rather jarring and confusing until you grow used to your body, so if you, say, merged with a clefairy, you may find yourself oddly skittish, repulsed by loud noises, and brimming with energy under full moons until you learn to ignore certain unpleasant sensations. On the positive side, grasping your pokémon-based powers and techniques may come easier than one would think, as those tend to rely on instinct and intuition more than anything else. (On that note, I would imagine that Metronome would be a terrible thing to experiment with, but I would know nothing about this.)

Now, when it comes to being caught, in theory, because you share a genetic code with actual pokémon, yes, a poké ball may just work on you, which is why it is likely of the utmost importance that you establish that you are not, in fact, a pokémon, usually by simply speaking to any approaching trainer (such as the young trainers who have, in this hypothetical situation, managed to break into your lab at a highly convenient time).

As for other pokémon, it really depends. Your own will likely recognize you by scent (that and you would presumably tell them of your situation). Wild pokémon may not be so discerning. Some may be confused if they can smell the human in you, but others—especially bird pokémon such as fearow—may only see you as a pokémon (which would be rather unfortunate if you happened to mess up an entirely unrelated experiment and merged yourself with its primary food source, rattata … which, again, I would know nothing about).

On the positive side, generally speaking, a number of your senses may be sharper, and you will temporarily gain a unique perspective (pun most definitely intended). On the negative side, the actual transformation process may sting a bit, the act of getting used to your body will likely be awkward, and the journey towards restoring yourself may be tedious and require bribing young trainers.

Again. Not that I would know anything about this.

whos your favorite pokemon mascot for advertisments? whos your least favorite?

At the risk of sounding a bit … radical, imagine the worst movie you’ve ever seen in terms of product placement. Think about how those products were presented in the movie you’ve watched. Consider, for a long while, how uncomfortable, awkward, and intrusive those ads might have been.

To borrow a phrase from pop culture and Bebe, those movies “ain’t got nothin’ on Goldenrod City.”

So to this day, I actively try not to pay much attention to mascots. All of them are blatant attempts at luring people into buying products through the nefarious front of a cute, animated face.

…

Okay, maybe I like Hello Skitty a little. But that’s just because she’s cute.

Do these ‘incidents’ that keep happening relate to trying to be an eevee by any chance?

No, of course not. They’re strictly related to my experiments with teleportation.

So in other words, they’re more related to the fact that Bill keeps forgetting to enable the safety lock. —LH

To be fair, when one’s lab is on fire, a safety lock is the last thing on their mind. —Bill

So why don’t you reconfigure it to activate automatically upon sensing smoke, a power surge, or a sharp increase in temperature? —LH

That thought only just now occurred to you, didn’t it? —LH

…maybe. —Bill

Bill, what would you say if someone told you Celio might one day build a religion around you?

I’d say it’s not the first time someone’s insinuated that Celio’s loyalty is anything other than simple friendship (and perhaps a little misplaced admiration). Most people have Celio all wrong, in my opinion. Certainly, he’s a bit excitable whenever I’m around, but that’s perfectly normal whenever a person looks up to someone else, right? In any case, we’re just friends; I doubt it would escalate into anything else on either side. Celio is, after all, ultimately a rather down-to-earth, rational human being. Sometimes, he’s even more grounded than the rest of us.

But for the sake of covering everything (as it were), should anyone in the administrator community even think about forming a religion based on me, I would like them to know that they can do so over my dead body.