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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Jesus Christ I hope you're vegan. If you're upset about a silly joke considering the diagetic implications of monster collector/automation games: what we do to beings that have actual feelings should be a real concern for you.
Pokémon spends a lot of time—a silly amount of time, really—explaining how the fighting you're doing against other trainers isn't a bad thing, it's not cruel. It's more like sport. They like doing it. You bond with them over it. Everyone faints, no one dies. And when you're fighting Team Rocket, well, that's just a good cause. Something your Pokémon believe in just as much as you do.
So the lore goes, anyway. A bit naive, but sincere and earnest. Good values.
This very funny Palworld description is saying it's okay to treat them like slaves.
Like, they might not want to work on your cabin for you, but actually, there is no labor board to stop you from forcing them to. Do you think that keeping slaves is funny? Like, no other context, just: I have slaves, that is funny to me.
If the writer of this laugh out loud, very funny steam description doesn't mean it that way, they should change the joke. As a high-school graduate, you should be able to pick up subtext like this. It's very simple.
Sorry for the bold, I just wanted to make sure you saw me insulting you.
Keep in mind, I've never played this game: I have no opinions. Are they treated like slaves? Would you care to enlighten us?
Yeah so it doesn't really matter what the "lore" is. Like if I write a book series with a slave race but I put in a line where a representative of the slave species, let's call them uhhh mouse-elves, says "oh master we love being slaves!" that doesn't actually change anything meaningful.
There is always this disconnect between the fact that in Pokémon, Digimon, SMT, whatever else I'm forgetting for all the "no this is actually good clean fun" (ok smt goes a bit darker but still very sanitised) the creatures exhibit almost 0 agency and at the end of the day mudkip is facing down a moon sized laser beam from a galactic god. Further in the media around at least Pokémon trainers are legitimately worried when their "pets" are overmatched or hurt.
So as much as they say "oh it's ok because mc gobbledygook" there is an enormous dissonance between what the audience sees/what the player does and what the media presents it as.
Also I note you're not vegan, so it's utterly bizarre you're concerned about the imaginary welfare of animated fantasy monsters but not actual earthlings we share the planet with and murder for pleasure.
also edit: I never graduated highschool, I was a bit busy being abused, I do have a masters and the ruins of a PhD though. I would tentatively suggest you focus your outrage on actual real problems and not kinda lazy filtered through a different culture and language parody of a genre advertising jokes.
You can just say Harry Potter. I'm not going to defend JK Rowling.
If you're critical of Pokémon's lazy handling of its own premise, why are you castigating people for being critical of this one?
If people are making pro-worker or anti-animal-abuse arguments, and "wow, animal slaves isn't cool" is certainly one of those, embolden them. What are you doing?
I don't even know what your position is anymore. It's bad for a very tongue in cheek game to make a joke about lack of labour rights for monsters in their advertising, but it's fine for other monster collectors to just not acknowledged how disquieting the premise is because they explain it away by lore, but when Rowling explains something away by lore it's not excuseable because lore doesn't have any material impact on what people are implicitly writing about?
I think you should probably just learn about the game before having an opinion about it. It is very unserious. It is parody homage, and also just dumb and cute. It's like getting worked up about mario kart encouraging teen destruction derbies or something. We're not looking at something like the skeezy line blurring between Hollywood and the usaian MIC as the usaian department of war requires films to adopt pro imperial stances in order to grant access to military hardware which in turn makes movies more visually appealing.
It's just a ridiculous little toy going "Monster collectors are very silly hey?" where you can pat the cute mammoth in the spa and also work 100 cats to depression making bombs.
This doesn't have any meaningful impact, if you want to improve the world go do a weekend at your nearest animal rescue, volunteer your time teaching your local language to migrants, or promote a Union at your job.
Oh you know what actually, this post might help you understand why I am the way I am.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Sigmarxism/comments/11wt3kp/the_plague_of_diegetic_essentialism_or_how_i/