What happens when you take a clearly childish subject and put it through the Internet blender? Well, clearly, it becomes an uncontrollable monster. That’s what has happened to Pokémon after trying to get a loyal community to talk about the best games, strategies to win on Switch or the news of ‘Pokémon Go‘: instead, they have found themselves with horny people and first-class trolls. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
Which Pokémon is the hottest?
It’s normal to want to bring your community together, and the official Pokémon website has created a new way to do it: no social networks, no chats. A return to the old forums, which gave us so much joy (unless you were a moderator, in which case the visits to the psychologist will still last). The problem is that, when you think your fans love you so much that they will self-moderate, you get the opposite of what you wanted: a flood of topics hotter than Spain in August.
“Which girl would you tickle torment?” (note: “Tickle torment” is not a Pokémon ability); “Which Pokémon is hotter?”; “I’m incredibly attracted to Gardevoir“… To no one’s surprise, those who played Pokémon 25 years ago now have other kinds of more, shall we say, earthly interests. Obviously, these posts have been immediately removed from the forums (well, after a while where people have been able to comment on their sexual opinions about Gardevoir), but others enter a gray area.
“Penny is trans, by the way,” commented one user referring to the ‘Scarlet/Purple Pokémon’ character in a post that was also deleted by moderators. And it’s one thing to remove clearly malicious discussions and another to ban discussion of a character’s sexual identity. Put another way: it’s not the same thing to talk about the Pokémon you want to bring in as it is to talk about a character’s gender.
The thing, to Game Freak’s despair, has not stopped, although the playfulness has taken a back seat to the most blatant trolling: “Giovanni did nothing wrong”; “Does anyone else want Jynx to have succulent feet in games?”; “Would you have a relationship with a Ditto? “; “Which Pokémon would be the best at destroying evidence of several unconnected crimes?“… As of today the forum seems quiet, but it’s only because the moderators are learning the worst possible way that one can’t mess with the Internet: just try to navigate its tempestuous waters as best you can without sinking.
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