The difference is Pokemon makes it clear that the Pokemon enjoy battling and do it voluntarily
Are these the same people who accept JK Rowling's "the house elves are slaves but they like it so it's cool and even the idea of emancipation is a joke" with no further introspection?
Literally a pro slavery argument...
"The slaves got free housing and learned important job skills!"
Taking my Charmander down to the Pokemon center to get electroshock treatment for her drapetomania and then trauma-bonding afterwards with pokemon treats that are basically like heroin
You would think, but in the lore Pokemon do just casually form fight clubs and have small wars. In addition, something about teaming up with humans allows them to unlock power boosts or just having access to a coach. Granted, the levels of intelligence and similarity to human psychology can vary from Mon to Mon. One example is that Basculin in the lore is basically just a violent trout, making it less of a moral concern to many in-universe gourmands. Meanwhile other Pokemon like Alakazam or Orangaru is effectively a human with magic powers.
I'm sure the godly and legendary creatures I keep in a capsule in a bank are feeling good about it. Oh you're the god of space? Enjoy the luxury ball it's the only thing you'll ever see again
Why shell out for the luxury ball?
Last one before i ran out completely
That always bugged me with the Pokémon defense. "Oh, but they like that im the master and tell them to do things. We're all friends, just a big family!" Is the exact argument you would use if you were subjugating others but didn't want to feel bad about it.
"Hey, you better shut up! You're giving away our entire anti-unionization playbook!"
Are we gonna start a struggle session on keeping pets?
that would be a completely ridiculous struggle session to have, no one is against banning pets, unless you're a bastard landlord or have justifiable reasons due to allergies (but even then its usually 'keep them out of this area' not 'ban people from having animal friends')
so hexbear will stay free of such things
I love how you said this but now someone is in fact unironically arguing it.
Never underestimate Hexbear again.
I IMPLORE you all to read this https://hexbear.net/post/763625, diegetic essentialism is a waste of time and infantilizes you. Please, stop it.
Ok that was great. I love when someone puts an inexplicable feeling into concrete terms. Once with this DE stuff and twice with the the banger within a banger when op calls to stop calling everything fascism. Thanks 🙏
Without reading (I am a staunch antiintellectual, yuck), is diegetic essentialism the boiling down of a text into strictly what happens within the text and ignoring the fact that it’s humans who consume the text and that that process can create meaning beyond that of the literal text?
The main series pokemon games have a move called Frustration which increases damage the less friendship the user has with their pokemon.
Why does this move exist in a game about friendship and loving the creatures you capture against their will? 
This problem could just be solved by making pokemon not real creatures in the world but just spirits. Unfortunately, it seems that pokemon society is not vegan so it's also canon that people just eat pokemon.
One game's villain has a pokemon that uses a maximum-damage Frustration. Friendship's default value isn't zero, meaning gamefreak has gone out of their way to say "this guy canonically abuses his pokemon"
I'm gonna brutalize one Pokemon for every dumbass comment in this thread. Sorry comrades but I've already stomped a Maushold to death and that's basically 4 pokemon in 1
also the whole debate over this shit is basically a veiled form of the vegan struggle session so lets just stop pretending we're concerned for the rights of pixels in the shape of an orange dragon
chill out, people want to have fake monsters fight each other
SMT negotiations are by far my favorite monster-collecting methods. Just equal parts philosophy, flirtation, and gibberish as they vibe check you.
Jack Frost has joined your party without your consent!
Pokemon is cockfighting, Mario massacres Goombas and turns by the hundreds in any given game and we know from Paper Mario they're fully sentient and about equal to human intelligence, the star fox team are a PMC, Samus has blown up 3 planets, maybe more ans wiped out 2 species, sorta 3 if you count Evil Beak or whatever from Dread, he was likely the last Chozo. None of this shit really makes any sense and it's pretty senseless to go thst deep into it. Especially if you're being serious.
Meanwhile the chad 
saves animals and the environment from the capitalist, imperialist Eggman by destroying polluting robots
Diegetic essentialism 101, it leads people to ask deeply unserious and frankly stupid questions like: "is superman actually a socialist?". Like, no , unless superman is written as such, he's not. These fantasy worlds you escape into? Theyre written a certain way by its authors, and no amount of nerd slapfighting online will change that, please stop wasting your time.
deeply unserious vibeo game lore
What a weird game, the more I see of it the more baffled I am.
It's a power fantasy for babies, that's all.
Its me. Im babies
It's Pokemon mixed with Rimworld. That's it.
And this is why Digimon was always the proletarian choice!
...
I'm sorry, I'll see myself out ...
Hot take: game is fun, not great but it's early acess so it could get better
Honestly feels more like the Pokémon anime than the games in many ways but in a good way, little things like letting out my fire pal as a light source while mining at night feels better than anything gamefreak has done in the last 20 years
PoKeMoN iS aBoUt CoCk FiGhTiNg is baby's first edgy media interpretation. There are multiple storylines over the decades of the franchises existence that deal with Pokemon not wanting to fight and they all conclude with the message that you shouldn't force them to fight - and in the games it's stated that when they "attack" you, it's because they want to test you to see if you're good enough to be their trainer.
"The author wrote the text so the victims are happy with their lot, so criticism of their treatment is invalid" is also an immature media interpretation, and worth about as much as "All characters depicted in this work are 18 or older even if stated otherwise".
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the house elves in Harry Potter are explicitly written as content with enslavement, but everybody sees that as transparently problematic. What's the difference?
It's fine to like pokemon (I liked/still kinda like it) but that doesn't mean I'm blind to the iffy nature of the premise
Pokemon makes it clear that the Pokemon enjoy battling
Mewtwo simply has drapetomania then?
back in my day we just made a 3 panel sprite webcomic about johto's labor laws, not a whole shit game with I'm assuming nfts two years after anyone cares about those
No NFTs afaik and first impressions are surprisingly positive from what I see online. Apparently there's a lot of factorio-lite automation gameplay???
I’m pretty sure the Pokémon died in the comics but that also may have been a meme idk
pokemon is basically a shonen
This is less true for me than others because I spent 80% of my time in Pokemon X in Pokemon Aimie playing games with, petting, and feeding my Pokemon rather than battling with them
But yeah.
amazing that the first comment is "you see, these races simply enjoy being slaves, its their natural condition!"
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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