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    <title>I don't particularly like Pokemon - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>I don't particularly like Pokemon</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 12-23-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>I don't particularly like Pokemon, as you could hopefully tell by the title. I don't hate it; there's just... something that rubs me the wrong way whenever I see one.</p>

<p>A *lot* of things that rub me the wrong way, actually, now that I think of it.</p>

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<li>Towards the end of the Lucine saga (before everything went tits up), for whatever reason, I was bored with the state of my identity, so I went searching for more things to kin. I thought Arceus looked kinda cool, and he had a white-and-gold aesthetic, and I instantly fell in love. So it was a clear logical leap from that to "I was literally this in a past life." So now, whenever someone summons him in Smash during a fight, I get a reminder of that little pocket of time when the world was confusing and the world wasn't mine.</li>

<li>The skin textures rub me the wrong way. It wasn't so much of a problem in the older games, where everything was pixellized to hell, but in Smash? I just don't understand how Charizard can be so... smooth. And what's up with the weird proportioning of Incineroar's body? It's jarring seeing a furry wrestler walking towards you and it looks like the lower half of his body was shrunken by the lightning item while his upper half remains intact. And what about Pokemon anatomy? Do they have bones and flesh like us? Do they bleed when they're hurt? Or are they just amalgamations of... some kind of plasticky substance that happened to take a specific form?</li>

<li>It's a gateway to capitalist exploitation. Especially with the older games, if you wanted to play with multiple people, you had to buy more than one copy of the same game. And it's not enough to buy just that- since games are released in pairs, you have to get the matching one too if you want to get *all* of the Pokemon. And once you do get your hands on the games, and you manage to play all the way through and beat the final boss, there's not much else to do other than collect one of each kind of critter in the Pokedex. Just collect, collect, collect. Like hoarders do, except it's somehow more acceptable since it's in digital form. And with the card game, you don't see exactly which cards are in a pack (at least, last time I bought one) since the packaging's completely opaque. Either you get lucky and end up with one card that you want and a bunch of ones that are essentially junk, or you get all junk cards. More and more cards that you don't want, and more and more of your money down the drain.</li>
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<p>I don't hate Pokemon. I still have fond memories of sitting in my first house as a kindergartener, waiting for my dad to come down to the living room so we could play a quick round of the card game. And of course, one could pick any game out of the void and make these exact same complaints, albeit tweaked a bit since not every game has the same mechanics. But if the franchise's main slogan is literally promoting obsessive hoarding, then I have to stop and give pause.</p>
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