A Minor Case of Serious Heart Pangs

Can a girl read between the lines?

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In 2007, legendary Hall of Fame baseball player and broadcaster, Bob Uecker, stayed in a Pittsburgh hotel that was home to Anthrocon, the largest furry convention in the world. While broadcasting, the octogenarian sports legend said that "they call themselves furriers, I believe," and "the furrier society were checking themselves in just as the team arrived. A little strange, but....that's their thing."

As Anthrocon is historically held minutes from PNC Park where the Pittsburgh Pirates play, many baseball players have an association with furry. For example, former Major League MVP for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Andrew "Cutch" McCutchen (average: .419) always tweeted about furries when Anthrocon was in town for Pittsburgh home games. On a podcast hosted by the former quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cutch was asked point blank if he was a furry, and he said he "had no fursona." McCutchen's fascination with furries is so well known that there is a t-shirt design with Cutch in Pittsburgh with the word "FURRIES" on it.

you’re in the pocket of Big Ball, I see

there’s no pocket for me to BE in, there’s no LOBBYING involved, there’s no SUPPRESSION campaign because you don’t need one! traditional methods suppress themselves when you make modern pokéballs available. you might as well start accusing AT&T of deliberately suppressing the noble traditional art form of the goddamn semaphore.

not to mention OP demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the market realities of the pokéball industry- Silph and Devon are not monopolies, if they weren’t in constant competition their magic monster domination spheres wouldn’t cost two bucks a pop. the ball spec is a public standard, and Bill Masaki’s storage system based on that standard is an open-source project. they’re only the two largest players because they’re able to leverage economies of scale. you still get smaller operations like the Laverre City Poké Ball Factory, with better regional supply chains and local brand recognition, making room for themselves in the market. 

That notion was, and remains, a tool to limit general access to Pokémon in the interest of maintaining class disparities. I mean, have we already forgotten the Aether Foundation’s pseudo-conservationist nonsense? Their attempt to manipulate natural resources and establish a power base in Alola, while they were modernizing and taking their place on the world stage, was founded on this exact rhetoric of “rescuing” Pokémon from local disenfranchised populations, as if taking Pokémon away from places like Po Town would improve things instead of increasing competition between trainers and decreasing safety.

The release of the $2 pokeball meant that the balance of power shifted to the common citizens. If any child can wield the power of a god, the military and the government and the wealthiest businessmen have no power over them.

More than that, instead of power being determined by the wealth to acquire pokemon, power comes exclusively from the dedication, effort, and empathy required to train them to high levels and to maintain their loyalty. If a person simply buys their pokemon, then those pokemon will either stay at low levels forever, or refuse to obey the human because there is no respect between them; the most powerful people in the world are those who caught a critter at level 2-5 and then devoted their life to raising it into a world power.

My photo collection of all the themed manhole covers I randomly found in Lumiose City

1. Pyroar

2. Hawlucha

3. Pokéball (not a pokémon but also deserves some love!)

4. Gogoat (this one is very adorable~)

5. Greninja 💙

6. Aegislash

Edit: I think these are all the manhole covers with different designs on them in Lumiose, each representing one District