To put it in short, for the same reason Twineedle is a bug-type move, despite the fact that it’s just the act of stabbing something with a stinger: it’s not just about how basic a move is but also with which element is incorporated into its use. Bite may look like an ordinary bite, but it’s only truly the Bite technique if it also involves imbuing the user’s teeth with dark-type energy. Crunch is the same way but in larger, easier to see doses. (This, plus the fact that the dark type was discovered after Bite’s registration as an officially recognized technique, is why it was originally classified as a normal-type move, by the way.)
Tag: moves
Is it dangerous to be near a pokemon using Perish Song? Assuming you’re not the intended target, of course.
Only if you’re a pokémon (or partly one). For pokémon, yes, you will need to ensure the safety of everyone on the battlefield. If a wild pokémon uses it, have your poké ball on hand, as well as perhaps an empty one if the user would be put in danger by fainting in the open.
For humans, however, it’s just deeply annoying. Think nails on a chalkboard both during initial use and briefly when the move is supposed to take effect.
How does Skitty use Assist? How does it work?
I’d answer “quite well,” but there’s a part one to this ask, and my editor has preemptively sent me a very stern warning punctuated with a screenshot from the latest episode of Binaclebob Trapezoidpants.
That said, the short answer is that it’s very similar to Metronome (whose mechanics I’ve talked about here: http://bills-pokedex.tumblr.com/post/167427470140/how-do-moves-like-metronome-work), just on a limited basis. That is, whereas Metronome may call upon any move in existence, Assist only calls upon moves known by the members of a single party, including the user themselves and party members that have yet to be born (i.e., eggs). How it does this is a bit of a mystery in the pokémon research community, although there are theories, two of which are strongly related to the theories behind Metronome.
The first theory is that all moves are hard-coded into every pokémon’s DNA (as every pokémon is the descendant of Mew, which supposedly could learn a wide variety of moves); it’s just that most techniques have been blocked off by eons of evolution and the development of physical blocks. However, as with Metronome, Assist allows a user to temporarily overcome these blocks and call upon moves that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. The difference is that while Metronome requires no examples to use, according to this theory, Assist actually calls upon memories of the user’s teammates either using these moves or educating the user about how they’re performed. In other words, the skitty (or other Assist user) watches the move being used and emulates it later through Assist. Unfortunately, the problem with this theory is that Assist can also call upon the moves of unborn teammates or moves that a teammate hasn’t yet had the opportunity to use in the first place, but in terms of practicality, this theory makes a bit of sense.
Personally, though, I prefer the second theory, which is that the user themselves don’t call upon the technique Assist emulates but rather the move itself does. However, unlike Metronome, Assist operates on the bonds between the user and their teammates (including the bonds a skitty or what-have-you has with an egg) in order to detect aural potential and project a randomly chosen move. In other words, I feel that there’s a deep connection between a pokémon’s abilities and its life force, that Assist uses a pokémon’s feelings towards others to reach out and detect abilities as encoded in their life force, and finally that Assist uses this information to temporarily bestow upon a user the ability to use one of their close friends’ powers.
In other words, a lot of it is magic, but it’s an explainable magic.
Bill, I’m sure you’re the best person to ask about this, how does Payday not ruin the economy?
Contrary to popular belief, Pay Day does not generate money from thin air. Rather, it generates meowth charms from thin air. These meowth charms are not technically money but may be sold back to pokémarts for a certain amount, depending on the quality of the charm, the karat of the gold, and the seller themselves. Ultimately, however, the amount a charm can be sold for goes for less than ¥100, so while some young or unlucky trainers may be desperate enough to sell these charms, they’re more or less trivial little trinkets to anyone else but meowth aficionados, as the effort to generate and cash them far outweighs the payoff.
For those wondering how generating anything out of thin air that may be sold to an ordinary pokémart doesn’t ruin the economy or bankrupt a mart, also note that the charms can then be sold to local meowth afficionados, who are as numerous as they are gifted with vast disposable incomes. There are entire online communities dedicated to meowth fanatics’ vast collections of Pay Day-generated charms, with users from all over the world. Apparently, every charm is unique in color, texture, quality, luster, and so forth, and many forums are dedicated to the sharing and discussion of meowth charm flaws. Some meowth fanatics even travel from region to region, visiting pokémarts in a dedicated search for charms to add to their collections.
Of course, as tempting as it would be to judge, I’d advise you not to do so. There are certainly communities of species-specific pokémaniacs that are a bit more avid in their collecting habits than this.
The eevee fan communities, for example, compare shades of non-shiny eevee fur. —LH
Which are a vast spectrum of different but equally fascinating shades! —Bill
They’re brown, Bill. Also, do you really need sixteen threads dedicated to that? That’s what a sticky is for! —LH
I just found out Pangoro can learn the TM for Infestation. Let me repeat that: My overweight muscle bear can infest other pokemon. How can you be INFESTED by a BEAR?!? Bill, could you please tell me how this works before morbid curiosity kicks in and I teach it to him? Or before I go and catch a Mr. Mine to teach this TM to instead. (Turns out you can also be infested by clowns.) Please stop me Bill. Help.
Editorial note: Bill, this question is not to be answered with bear puns. —LH
Oh, Infestation from a pangoro is quite unbearable, anonymous.
Bill, I swear to literally all the gods. —LH
In all seriousness, the pokémon themselves don’t do the infestation. Rather, they summon swarms of bugs that overwhelm their opponents. This is why it’s difficult to escape while the infestation is active: there are so many bugs swarming your pokémon that you simply can’t withdraw them.
Happy battling, anonymous!
Can pokemon be homosexual? In cases like this why would the move Attract fail against pokemon of the same sex?
Attract is a bit of a tricky subject, anonymous. So to answer the simpler question first, absolutely, pokémon can be homosexual. In fact, while it’s not the predominant form of sexuality, it’s also not uncommon for pokémon to be attracted to pokémon of the same sex. Likewise, practically any form of sexuality exhibited by humans can be found among pokémon, and some pokémon species also engage in intercourse not only for breeding but also for the sheer pleasure of it. Sex is, in other words, not just for procreation, even when it comes to pokémon.
However, Attract doesn’t really take into consideration sexuality. Not really, anyway. It’s simply a move that forces the victim to let its guard down by perceiving the user as being attractive, not in a sexual or romantic way but instead in an aesthetic way. Pokémon simply don’t want to hit something that looks too pretty to hit, even if that pretty thing is something they wouldn’t normally be attracted to.
As for why it can only be used against Pokémon that don’t match the user’s sex (unless the user has no gender, at which point it fails, regardless of what the target is), scientists aren’t entirely sure. The prevailing theory is that it’s simply a type of empathic wave that’s slightly different when emitted by one sex than it is when emitted by the other and that this slight difference is enough to make it ineffective against members of the same sex.
The Pokédex According to Bill 