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.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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I’ve read this. It really does not work in this context. Nobody is defending or genuinely attacking Pokémon due to its incidental inclusion of cockfighting. What we are doing is defending Palworld, because it’s implicitly referencing this sort of fucked up aspect of Pokémon when you think of it too much, as a shitpost.
Not to mention the fact that there is genuine cultural analysis to be made about the fact that we just... have games about collecting sentient creatures and putting them into tiny spaces and don't comment about it at all.
Ok, I mostly agree with you, but people have been pointing out Pokemon makes animals fight since day one. (Parents also called it satanic lol)
Yes, it’s a classic shitpost
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!
And this is why Digimon was always the proletarian choice!
...
I'm sorry, I'll see myself out ...
Never really tried the games but the Digimon anime was objectively better than the Pokémon anime and I will fight anyone who says otherwise
Digimon slaps so fucking hard
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?
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
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.
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.
Are we gonna start a struggle session on keeping pets?
I'm in, I've always thought pet ownership was weird.
We co-evolved with dogs over the course of 40,000 years. in so far as the temr "natural" means anything, it is natural for dogs and humans to live together in close cooperation. there's a theory going that humans and dogs (and domesticated agricultural plants) co-domesticated each other and that our close relationship with dogs (and wheat) is why humans seem to share many traits found in domesticated animals but not wild animals.
Malazan plays with this idea by claiming giant fantasy dogs that work for the god of death protected early humans and we kinda evolved as a result. or something like that, its been years.
Most people don't have pets fight each other...
The comment I replied to was talking about the subjugation part.
Yeah, which it is a fair criticism of using animals for labor, but again most people don't do that
but again most people don't do that
Billions of people across the world use animals for labor, before the Industrial Revolution most people did. In much of the underdeveloped world you often have to use animal labor to survive. And often people who exploit animal labor feel genuine affection for the animals, plenty of people who use dogs for more utilitarian means still love them, plenty of farmers care for the donkey that hauls their produce to market.
Why should animals be forced to live within your limits though, even if you treat them 'well'? You're trapping them in homes or even cages, they have basically no agency.
Because if they get outside they’ll get killed by a car and/or fuck up the environment
Pets SHOULDN’T exist, but that isn’t fixable by having individuals throw “their” animals outside, it doesn’t fix anything and causes more suffering
So I’m not “against pets” any more than someone is “against food” because they got it from a capitalist grocery store
Oh I'm not saying pets should all be euthanized immediately or anything, just that the pet and pet-breeding industry should be phased out with the goal of animals existing almost solely in the wild in the future.
Dogs have co-evolved to live and cooperate with humans for 40,000 years. Hanging out with us all the time is their natural environment, it is their "wilderness". Though i should also point out that you're committing the naturalistic fallacy, ie what is natural (malnutrition, mange, horrible parasite load, being killed by predators, dying due to untreated illness and injurt, being mauled by other dogs, freezing to death, bad water, scavenging carcasses, etc) is good. The concepts of "nature" and "wilderness" are also problematic; for one, dogs and cats are not wild animals. They arr domesticated. They have coevolved with humans to live in human environments under human care.
"Wild" is a problematic concept at best. Wilderness" as popularly conceived of in the west is mostly a racist construction that serves to erase the presence and history of indigenous people. There is not and never has been a "wild" separate from the human domain. We"ve been everywhere on earth for tens of thousands of years. Much of the face of the earth has been influenced and often heavily influenced by human habitation.
Dogs don't share some abstracted notion of freedom and independence with settler brained american libertarians. They're dogs. They want to hang out with humans who treat them well. That's their whole thing. They're fully, completely domesticated, which i suspect many "having pets is immoral" people don't fully comprehend. Frankly I think it's a misapprehension of city people who haven't really spent much time in truly wild places where the wildlife has not acclimated to human presence the way it has in most of America and Europe.
Regardless, this abstract, idealistic notion that dogs "lack agency" is not materialist. It's also not a very strong argument from an idealistic perspective. Most of the time, being domesticated rather than wild animals, feral dogs suffer even shorter, more violent, more miserable lives than wild animals that are at least adapted to their environments. This is because they are dependent on cooperation with humans for their wellbeing. Domestication has made them more playful, less aggressive, much less shy and suspicious and cautious, much more social, given them the nearly unique abilitiy to recognize human gestures and body language, and so forth. Contrast this with wolves, which are genetically speaking a very similar species, and the massive differences in behavior, physical structure, and psychology are stark and impossible to explain away.
Dogs cannot survive and thrive without us (and I'd argue humans are equally lost and miserable without dogs). They have no place in the world except alongside humans. Whatever assertion you're making, what you're defacto asking for is the destruction of the entire species because their mere existence doesn't conform to your idealist notions of agency and independence.
Is it bait if its baiting but I also unironically believe it?
On one hand, I agree, on the other hand, I think forcing people to live without a cat is some kind of war crime
If you love cats, let them go 
outdoor cats live miserable lives. if you love something you don't damn it to a short life of brutality and disease
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