Honestly? Yeah, you do. Paul isn't very deep into "the cult of hard choices," as you put it. He just doesn't care enough about things that should be hard choices, so they aren't hard for him. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, it doesn't take effort to be an asshole. It takes effort not to. Some people just put the lion's share of that effort in earlier than others, or put in more of it.
Some people don't put much effort into it at all, and that's how you get Paul. Honestly he's not even all that bad, compared to many people.
Yeah, I call foul. Mawile wants to get stronger for reasons of personal safety, as she had and has good reason to think that being weak and isolated would end with her dead. For Mawile, getting stronger is a matter of survival, not ego.
...
For Mawile, getting stronger is a means to an end. For Paul, Power is the end in itself.
Ehh, it's all different flavours of duress. Mawile is trying to survive, but does so by straight-up killing people at a much higher rate than Paul abducts and brutalises folk. I mean, sure, eating basically has to be a moral blind-spot because life can't exist without killing more than it sustains, or scavenging(be it from corpses or stars or chemical vents... it is all just various flavours of taking a large amount of energy and turning into a lesser one, though generally more concentrated. Then you can go off and reframe it as the ability for the finite energy sources to sustain life, and inevitably find that by living, others are denied the ability to do so themselves, even with no direct interaction.) ro offset the killing to something else, so you really can't have life without answering "is it okay for one person to kill two others solely for their personal benefit" with "yes" or just politely ignoring that food is a thing. So any sort of objective ethics would come down to Mawile's killing being a greater cause of harm but due to greater need, while Paul's brutalising presumably does much less damage, but by all appearances has far more petty justification. This is completely different from the K.K.K. example where they are both gaining less benefit and inflicting more harm than their counterparts, and thus you don't actually have to do any maths to compare them.
Of course, then we have to factor in that pokemon is weird and maybe no damage at all is required for anyone to live, that berries could be literally infinite and nutritious and plentiful and there would be plenty for everyone if they just controlled their population and denied themselves the joys of steaks. Mawile of course didn't know, and one could blame the stantler for keeping her in a dense-population, low-berry location, but her ignorance wouldn't stop her from being a mass-murderer. If Paul were eating manna from heaven that rains down to fulfil every human need, then all he is doing is bullying and dislocating maybe a couple-dozen kids every year, and keeping the ones who respond well to that, which is terrible, genuinely terrible, but not a patch on being a remorseless serial-killer, and if hunting isn't required then that would invalidate the "whirlpool circle of life" veto, thus making it a match between "killin' for the lulz" versus "the beatings will continue until morale improves" which I feel Mawile would lose.
So you can basically give killing for food a free pass, so Mawile did nothing wrong. Or you can acknowledge that it is impossible to morally or ethically justify killing for food and say that she is worse than Paul because she eats more than him and his abductions are comparatively insignificant. Or you can acknowledge that there is a massive pragmatic justification for killing for food, in that without it there is no life, and that life is probably the best bet at finding an alternative, and then we are back to Mawile did nothing wrong, but we get to feel uncomfortable about it, and then go searching for a pragmatic justification for Paul, like "strong trainers are required to stop the world from being literally ripped apart by gods, trying pretty much anything, including the Pauls of the world, is worth it so long as it ends up with powerful teams and experienced trainers to inflict percussive therapy upon legendaries.
Which now that I think on it would be kind-of plausible? How do we know all those powerful trainers that keep the peace never had their own Paul phase? Is there any proof that Giovanni and his elites don't march out every halloween to punch an army of ghosts because Kanto being eaten by ghosts would be bad for business? Will ten more years find Paul single-handedly holding the line against Team Awaken so that some naive kid can teach friendship to a fake fossil made out of hundreds of abra-line bones before the revival machine finishes? I could see even some pokemon, the more worldly ones, agreeing that it is better to let all of the Pauls of the world rampage than to risk that the next time someone tries to end the world all the former champions will be retired, the new ones will too busy trying to make the perfect poffin for their bestest friends to actually train, and the best hopes to save everything will be the likes of James, Jesse, and Meowth. I mean, it doesn't seem likely, but why take the risk? It is like Dungeons and Dragons and the dubious safety afforded by hosting roaming bands of murderhobos.
It really isn't that simple. Mawile will kill a lot of people on the way, and there really isn't an end to it, as there is always something stronger. Getting a patron might help, but patrons have the same problem of never being insurmountable, and Teddyursa had a literal mother bear for a patron...
Won't confirm what it actually is yet, but I'll say that between all of those, at least one of them pretty much has it. Though, given the sheer breadth of guesses, I suppose that was inevitable. ^_^;
On a related topic to all this food discussion, I'd like to note that there was actually a pretty major rewrite done on the middle section of this chapter regarding what Paul feeds his Pokemon. Originally, I figured that Paul is certainly smart enough to realize his Pokemon can't fight properly without eating properly, and since he goes around catching different Pokemon so often, he'd probably have multiple types of food on hand. As such, the first draft of this had him produce vacuum-sealed strips of Tauros steak for Mawile!me, which I was reluctantly thankful for, even if I still didn't taste it since it was, well, raw.
However, I then realized that Poke-kibble is extremely widespread in the anime, to the point that we rarely see Pokemon eating anything else. Thus, since Paul can theoretically carry around just one type of food that can be eaten by pretty much any Pokemon (albeit perhaps with different flavor and nutritional contents), him having meat, veggies, and whatever else on hand at all times just in case he came across something that ate them seemed a lot less likely. Then I rewatched Episode 53 of the D&P arc of the anime, in which we see in a flashback that Paul feeds Chimchar from a can like the ones described here... and since Mawile!me is roughly the same size/height as Chimchar (as are all the rest of the Pokemon he currently on hand), him just carrying generic cans of Pokemon food ended up seeming more sensible/in line with canon. Thus, that's ultimately what I went with.
...also, Episode 53 really shows you just about everything you could need to know about just how bad Paul was treating Chimchar by the end. Chimchar actually flinches when Ash unexpectedly pats his head. Poor little guy.
Heh, probably not without help - the carrying capacity of a Mawile is somewhat limited by the fact that they don't have clothes, equipment, or pretty much anything needed to hold on to something for an extended period of time. Which may become a bit of an issue in the near future.
If you try and think of it via actual anatomy (laughable in a world where somehow electron currents is enough to generate the nutrients to support life), mawile's can be kinda..... weird. Unless there's a secondary digestive system, this means that any food will need to travel down the hairstalk and through/around the brain to get into the main stomach. That jaw strength is considerably more impressive when you consider that Mawile can eat their prey whole, bones included. Gonna have to be able to grind that into a fine powder if it does travel down into the main body.
Perhaps the inside of the jaw-stem is simply a portal to a different dimension, which swallows up anything that comes its way, then apportions part of it back to Mawile's stomach to provide the actual sustenance portion.
...what? It makes as much sense as a lot of other Pokemon theories.
No kidding. The Pokemon we have based off of them aren't necessarily the weirdest, but the list of them includes:
-A woman whose hair becomes animate and shovels food into a second mouth on the back of her head (Mawile)
-A different woman with animate, extremely long hair who uses the thorn-tipped barbs on it to slice young men to pieces (Hatterene)
-A tree that grows and drops dead heads off of it instead of fruit (Exeggutor)
-A large ghost lantern whose stomach splits open to reveal a giant tongue (Dusknoir)
-A titanic catfish that causes earthquakes (Whiscash)
-A man/woman with an enormous head bobbing in the sea (Jellicent)
-A woman whose head detaches from her body and flies around at night (Misdreavus)
...I was actually gonna continue this with the rest that I know of (Ninetails/Zoroark, Froslass, Shiftree, Slowking, Weavile, and sort-of Spiritomb), but I got distracted by noticing just how many youkai-based Pokemon there are whose "unique feature" is pretty much just related to their heads or hair. What's with that theme?
I think kicking or headbutting probably wouldn't count (although intuitively I feel like Mawile hitting something with her maw would count for some reason?..), and I'm nearly certain things like biting, slicing attacks, and projectiles wouldn't.
...not likely, at least at present moment. In part just because I don't think I know enough about how the mafia works to write anything in that vein all that convincingly. ^^;
No no, ketchup is Pikachu's thing. Though it admittedly might be better PR to say that the red, sticky substance most of Mawile!me's food has come with thus far is in fact 'ketchup".
Flairile draws back a fist, takes a ready pose, and starts head-banging.
...
And now I am imagining a mosh pit filled with head-banging mawile and I am terrified.
Idk about Murkrow, but Elekid is Electabuzz' baby form, Chimchar is a babbu, Mawile is so tiny so as to not be able to swallow prey whole yet, which I'd guess is why they're so hungry and also why their non vegan meals are so messy and gory.
Murkrow has apparently been on Paul's team for quite a while now, so she's probably not too young. Otherwise though, yeah, Paul has an awful lot of relatively tiny, young Pokemon on his person at the start of Sinnoh. Of course, most of them get bigger pretty early on, and then Paul starts bringing out his earlier team members as well, at which point Paul becomes smaller than most of his Pokemon instead.
...that would actually be a fairly funny image, at least if the person involved wasn't, ya know, Paul.
Now I'm imagining Ash wandering aimlessly for an hour before Flair goes, "Uuuuugh, for the love of--give me that!" gesturing to his Poketech. Cue massive bewilderment on the part of himself and any other humans present.
Mawile!me: So help me, I will relearn English just to tell you how dumb you are if you somehow manage to walk us into the complete wrong town again. Why does anyone let you navigate?!
Mawile wants to get stronger for reasons of personal safety, as she had and has good reason to think that being weak and isolated would end with her dead. For Mawile, getting stronger is a matter of survival, not ego.
Yep, hit the nail on the head. Being one of the only cool parts of being a Pokemon now, Mawile!me would likely still want to get stronger anyways, but it would be a lot less imminent/pressing than it currently feels like it is.
If Mawile met a nice Gyarados that took a shine to her and decided that Mawile was her new granddaughter, we have no reason to think that Mawile wouldn't consider herself sufficiently secure to scale back her training to a sufficient degree as that she could stop eating people and instead choose to live a far more calm, relaxed life with her new safety-sea-serpent.
Everyone should have a safety sea serpent. Transport, protection, and family member all in one, who might even share their food with you! What's not to love?
I don't know. One thing about his current life is that he at least has the illusion of control, of life or death being at least sort of in your own hands. Meanwhile a lot of this planet is cosplaying at Catachan, a beautiful hellscape where... any day now... something will arbitrarily come along and pick the bones of your whole town. Before or after eating their souls. Larger population centers buddy up to the local militia called a gym and maybe you will be okay, everyone else has to subsist on a little bit of luck.
That's overstating it a fair bit - the Pokemon world is generally a lot nicer than that. Sure, occasionally there'll be some big calamity where the gods are usually involved, but those tend to get resolved fairly swiftly (though the amount of destruction can vary), and regular people generally don't have too much to worry about. It's not a flat out death world... though, certain Pokemon (ex. Farfetch'd) may admittedly disagree.
*It seems fairly likely to me that you could get eaten in pokemon cities. Muk, grimer, various ghost types, those hings that pretend to be ice cream cones ect...
Any city that doesn't have a severe pollution problem is unlikely to have Grimer and Muk wandering around, thankfully. Can't speak for ghost-types (though they seem as likely to be present in a city as anywhere else), but Vanniluxe... I don't think we have any evidence of them being carnivorous in any fashion? I'd honestly guess they subsist primarily on snow and ice. Not really sure why you'd think that. :?
Honestly? Yeah, you do. Paul isn't very deep into "the cult of hard choices," as you put it. He just doesn't care enough about things that should be hard choices, so they aren't hard for him. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, it doesn't take effort to be an asshole. It takes effort not to. Some people just put the lion's share of that effort in earlier than others, or put in more of it.
Pretty much, yeah. As I noted over on SB, Paul got his current attitude upon watching Brandon criticize his brother Reggie after their battle, advising that he find his inner strength. Paul actually took those words to heart himself, but took perhaps the worst interpretation of that advice that he possibly could have, deciding that his "inner strength" is actually his own will, and seemingly thus that he should value his Pokemon only as extension of that will, and virtually nothing else. Thus, when Paul decides to callously discard a Pokemon that failed him, he doesn't really see it as the "hard choice" of throwing away a living being and partner, he sees it as casting off a useless limb. Him becoming a better person would require him actually aknowledging Pokemon as thinking, intelligent beings themselves, rather than just living tools he can use to get where he wants.
So you can basically give killing for food a free pass, so Mawile did nothing wrong. Or you can acknowledge that it is impossible to morally or ethically justify killing for food and say that she is worse than Paul because she eats more than him and his abductions are comparatively insignificant. Or you can acknowledge that there is a massive pragmatic justification for killing for food, in that without it there is no life, and that life is probably the best bet at finding an alternative
...jeez, I really didn't mean for this story to get so deep into morality issues like this. I just based things off of the way the Pokedex describes Mawile, combined with the fact that many Pokemon are known to eat other Pokemon, and this is what resulted. Guess it was kind of unavoidable though, what with the hunger problems... ah well.
Is there any proof that Giovanni and his elites don't march out every halloween to punch an army of ghosts because Kanto being eaten by ghosts would be bad for business?
I mean, no, but you can't really posit something as being true just because of a lack of evidence it's not. That way lies college philosophy classes, and horrible roundabout thinking that ends up going nowhere. Trust me, I know.
On a lighter note, and also just because I'd like to have this for posterity both here and on SB, I'd like to note that the berries found at the end of this chapter were actually not something I wrote in just to make things easier on Mawile!me. As is probably clear by now, Chapter 3 of this fic was meant to line up with episode 6 of the D&P season. Episode 7 however has Ash and co stop near a lake sometime during the day, which is the same one shown here (and which I wrote Paul as reaching the evening beforehand, due to setting a significantly faster pace than Ash and co). In that episode, a small group of water Pokemon is found to have gathered up a near-literal mountain of berries (specifically of the same kinds mentioned in this chapter), presumably within the span of a single morning - I'm talking like a fifteen-foot tall pile here; the kind a person could literally dive inside of if they so wished. It's thus pretty easy to extrapolate that berries are significantly easier to come by, at least in this particular area, than in the forest Mawile!me has been living in up until now. Convenient timing, no~?
On a lighter note, and also just because I'd like to have this for posterity both here and on SB, I'd like to note that the berries found at the end of this chapter were actually not something I wrote in just to make things easier on Mawile!me. As is probably clear by now, Chapter 3 of this fic was meant to line up with episode 6 of the D&P season. Episode 7 however has Ash and co stop near a lake sometime during the day, which is the same one shown here (and which I wrote Paul as reaching the evening beforehand, due to setting a significantly faster pace than Ash and co). In that episode, a small group of water Pokemon is found to have gathered up a near-literal mountain of berries (specifically of the same kinds mentioned in this chapter), presumably within the span of a single morning - I'm talking like a fifteen-foot tall pile here; the kind a person could literally dive inside of if they so wished. It's thus pretty easy to extrapolate that berries are significantly easier to come by, at least in this particular area, than in the forest Mawile!me has been living in up until now. Convenient timing, no~?
Heh, probably not without help - the carrying capacity of a Mawile is somewhat limited by the fact that they don't have clothes, equipment, or pretty much anything needed to hold on to something for an extended period of time. Which may become a bit of an issue in the near future.
Yes, the symbiotic relationship between a Pokemon and their porter Trainer.
The Pokemon has incredible fighting abilities and exotic powers.
The Trainer has thumbs and a carry-all for stuff.
Occasionally there are orders and yelling involved, but the Pokemon are polite enough to ignore the random nonsense that spew out of Trainers.
The poor dears can't help it.
Visited the link that OP mentioned, turned out to have a ton of disturbing information regarding Pokemon eating other Pokemon, Pokemon eating other natural non Pokemon creatures we see very little of in the games and anime... And even random stuff I forgot about in the original anime about people eating Pokemon. But it was this gem of a quote that really got me.
While visiting the Canalave Library, it is revealed in the Sinnoh Folk Tales that Pokémon caught from the sea are eaten, and then the bones thrown back into the water. It is also mentioned that the Pokémon that were eaten will return fully fleshed.
Uh. What? Are Pokemon actually immortal or something? Or was this entry just a local folk tale designed by the sick bastards eating random fish Pokemon to make them not feel bad?
Visited the link that OP mentioned, turned out to have a ton of disturbing information regarding Pokemon eating other Pokemon, Pokemon eating other natural non Pokemon creatures we see very little of in the games and anime... And even random stuff I forgot about in the original anime about people eating Pokemon. But it was this gem of a quote that really got me.
While visiting the Canalave Library, it is revealed in the Sinnoh Folk Tales that Pokémon caught from the sea are eaten, and then the bones thrown back into the water. It is also mentioned that the Pokémon that were eaten will return fully fleshed.
Uh. What? Are Pokemon actually immortal or something? Or was this entry just a local folk tale designed by the sick bastards eating random fish Pokemon to make them not feel bad?
...I was actually gonna continue this list with the rest I know (Ninetails/Zoroark, Froslass, Shiftree, Slowking, Weavile, and sort-of Spiritomb), but I got distracted by noticing just how many youkai-based Pokemon there are whose "unique feature" is pretty much just related to their heads or hair. What's with that theme?
I blame all the Decapitations going on at the time.
Seriously, every single thing?
Off with their heads. Seriously.
Ritual Suicide? Cut stomach, second chops off head.
Enemy warlord, bandits, brigands, etcetera. Bring me their heads as proof.
Battlefields full of corpses? Bury their heads for honor reasons, burn the rest to save space and spare us from disease.
Ancient Japan had more of a fascination with heads than the Queen of Hearts!
To be fair, they're only supposed to sever the spinal cord (for the instant death thing, so you won't have to go slowly); chopping off the head is just what happens if you do it wrong.
Everyone shitting on Paul's training methods should probably take a moment to remember that this is an Anime reality and there is in fact every possibility that Training From Hell methodology not only works, but can produce the best results when combined with a sufficiently unrelenting refusal to give up.
Uh. What? Are Pokemon actually immortal or something? Or was this entry just a local folk tale designed by the sick bastards eating random fish Pokemon to make them not feel bad?
It would depend on the Pokemon I guess? I wouldn't be surprised if there are Pokemon who could do something like that, to say nothing of the existence of at least one Ghost-type variant that is literally just 'the normal Pokemon but its habitat was destroyed so it died and became a ghost' which, along with the many Ghost-types that are explicitly stated to be undead spirits of both people and Pokemon, implies Some Things about Pokemon in general.
And I'm not even going to get into the whole 'by the way one of the Pokemon is literally god' thing that Arceus has going.
Everyone shitting on Paul's training methods should probably take a moment to remember that this is an Anime reality and there is in fact every possibility that Training From Hell methodology not only works, but can produce the best results when combined with a sufficiently unrelenting refusal to give up.
I mean, maybe pokemon can improve under those conditions, but there was this whole character arc about how Paul thought Chimchar was useless and threw him away and Ash got him and trained him up to be super strong, so however good being a jerk is it's pretty obviously not as good as not being a jerk.
I mean, maybe pokemon can improve under those conditions, but there was this whole character arc about how Paul thought Chimchar was useless and threw him away and Ash got him and trained him up to be super strong, so however good being a jerk is it's pretty obviously not as good as not being a jerk.
Oh I'm not saying that Paul himself is any good as a Pokemon Trainer, just that being repeatedly electrocuted doesn't actually improve a Pokemon's electricity resistance is not an assumption I would make without experimentation; because in an Anime setting there is every possibility that it does.
So Paul's basic methodology might not be at fault so much as his apparent near-total disregard for his Pokemon. (Though given that I think he's supposed to be a prepubescent teenager, that kind of disregard isn't really surprising.)
Uh. What? Are Pokemon actually immortal or something? Or was this entry just a local folk tale designed by the sick bastards eating random fish Pokemon to make them not feel bad?
Doesn't seem like an especially atypical folktale about respecting nature – Use every part you can to avoid waste and minimize the need to kill, and whatever you can't use, give it a proper burial.
Yeah, I forget, but Isn't Paul like 12?
Being a horrible monster without any empathy is completely normal for those.
ASH is the WEIRD one!
I still shake my head every single time I am reminded that They sent off their 11 year old children to a world were their are literal magical murder beasts in the tall grass ready to disappear you.
Machismo is the Punchline truly explains my thoughts on it best.
Yeah, I forget, but Isn't Paul like 12?
Being a horrible monster without any empathy is completely normal for those.
ASH is the WEIRD one!
I still shake my head every single time I am reminded that They sent off their 11 year old children to a world were their are literal magical murder beasts in the tall grass ready to disappear you.
Machismo is the Punchline truly explains my thoughts on it best.
The Pokemon setting is one of those ones where if you ever actually stop and think about it, and I don't mean fridge logic I mean the actual stated canon, you realize that everything is way more hardcore than the media makes it appear.
It should come as no surprise that the people are equally hardcore and just give zero fucks about pansy-ass shit like personal safety.
If your kid is old enough to need two digits to write down their age, then your kid is old enough to start running some adorable murderbeast death matches.
I still shake my head every single time I am reminded that They sent off their 11 year old children to a world were their are literal magical murder beasts in the tall grass ready to disappear you.
