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bck356

Brett

@bck356

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bck356
@bck356

The PokéRogue transphobia drama and politics in Pokémon by cecilily

Okay well I meant my last post to be my "THE last post" because funny joke but this video essay was too good to not share. I'll just cheat and pin it

Honestly the first half of the video isn't uninteresting or anything, but it's mostly skippable especially if you don't care about PokéRogue. The context you'd be missing would basically be people complaining that Pokémon isn't supposed to be political. The second half starting at 15:30 is where it really takes off; it describes the political influences that led to the creation of Pokémon being the way it is, and describing art as essentially political (this is to contrast the first half where people were complaining about PokéRogue and other elements of Pokémon being made political in the first place.) By the way in PokéRogue Gardevoirs HAVE to be female. (at least they were at time of posting and for obvious reasons I will not be able to make corrections.) Make of that what you will.

EDIT: A lovely commenter has given some context about the Gardevoir thing, I recommend reading that too.

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in reply to @bck356's post:

hat-desu
@hat-desu

For what it's worth, based on what I hear the Gardevoir/Gallade thing was a lateral change to essentially get rid of Gender+Stone evos (namely Dawn Stone evos), which was also done to Froslass/Glalie, changing them to gender-only evos. While the change to gender-lock Gardevoir was made well before removing dawn stone, I think this is actually code jank: dawn stone would appear as a randomized item choice based on species in your party, even if your Kirlia was female, so they locked and separated them like a separate form instead.

(Later on dawn stone was fully removed, but there is no mechanism to choose evolutions from a menu or something, so the gender lock stayed.)

This did have an unintended consequence of making Gardevoir harder to obtain now, not to mention not being able to wait and choose what your Kirlia will become based on need, but the conversations in the discord almost never brought this up for some reason (except occassionally someone saying it messed up their run when they needed a special fairy attacker). I think they are resistant against changing it because it's been discussed to death for non-mechanical reasons (accusations of lingering transphobia), and changing it now would be seen as admitting it was done for shady reasons when they have continuously attested it isn't.

I think it's stubborn, personally. But they probably have more on their minds than cleaning this kind of thing up.

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bck356
@bck356

Thanks for the under the hood look at the story. It's really unfortunate that code jank got misinterpreted as transphobia, though since I'm not actually trans I don't think my opinion on whether that makes it okay or not is really valid. I guess the lesson here is that game mechanics are part of the "art" (in the culture sense) of a video game and so even they are subject to political interpretation.

It's a shame there's so little time left to talk about this here because I know this story is much bigger than a single developer like Sam; it has to be when a project grows in size to the point that Pokérogue has.

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hat-desu
@hat-desu

Right, what matters in the end is how it's received, but I think this specific issue just got caught up in the whirlwind of events. Pokerogue had to make lots of changes to the base game mechanics for it to work with their system, and this was just the one thing that could be tied to any real-world controversy.

The real world, including politics and societal controversies, are undeniably inseparable from art, which is created by real people within said society. It's childish and ignorant to pretend that's not the case for sure. But I do think there is a difference between there being a need for space to explore art critically, and said criticism being an obligate part of the experience. There is never enough room for that nuance though once the pushback starts, because it means they are already sick of regular discussion being suffused with meta-critique.

Not many social media sites naturally have the kind of neutral and long-form discussion space Cohost has which does allow for nuance, much less one without the engagement metrics and algorithms that eventually turn all of it toxic. I'll miss that.

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