This is why it's so fun to be the grown-up.
Oh, right. It's been ages since the village copied humans, so Astra can take notes.
Capitalism, HO!
Uh... Hopefully Steven didn't tell his dad about May.
Wow, it's about the size of a Master Ball!
They'll probably end up famous before they can finish the delivery, kek.
*diabolical laughter*
Oh dear. I was ever so hoping for a happy ending, but it seems that humanity is going to destroy Astra's village no matter what, even if it has to do so indirectly.
This, to me, really speaks to the human/pokemon mental distinction. The village existed, as a perfectly functional village, for a very long time, and never really changed drastically. They had the idea of a village, and stuck with that idea. Pokemon, even the ones with a lot of potential for civilisation, don't seem to pursue it, at all. The concept of developing new things might come up now and again, but it doesn't seem to have the same spread and adoption that humans do, and actually pursuing development as a full-time pursuit seems to be alien to them.
To my recollection, Astra can't do tactile illusions, and has, like, two short fingers pretty much indistinguishable from a long, dome-shaped hand. There were a couple of near-misses in the handshaking department and I wonder if Astra came close to a few weird looks her way. Well, a few more weird looks, it is not like she doesn't get plenty of those...
To be fair, this is also true of most humans for most of history. The idea that the future would be deeply different from the present (not just a few polities shifting borders and allegiances, but the whole way of living) is pretty recent. Progress occurred, but on timescales too long for an individual to perceive. An isolated Pokemon village would be the same. How much collective thought goes into research there, compared to even just this the Devon corporation?
Yup, it's really not just a Pokemon thing.
A bulky trenchcoat that makes Astra look like three Ralts standing on top of each other.
Pretty sure it has something to do with the clothing store that was mentioned last time. May is going to flip her shit.
I believe that no, they wouldn't. To build any society - not to mention civilization - at least a token spirit of cooperation is required. And idea of "togetherness", at least. But octopi, from what I heard, are often sociopathic to the extreme.
I feel that there are obvious factors holding them back. Primarily environment and population density. It is difficult to get momentum started underwater, so hitting things with sticks and rocks is less effective, especially prior to incapacitating it. They also have less ability to spread and record ideas. I suspect that humans are not actually all that mentally creative or complex. The upper reaches, sure, but nothing dramatically special. What they do seem to have in abundance is language. The ability to record information in a reproducible form and convey complex thoughts between one another with some measure of precision is really the sort of thing that gets the achievements of multiple generations accumulating into a civilisation. I rather suspect that, even though Octopuses seem to be more "intelligent" and have better dexterity, that cuttlefish are actually nearer to hitting the development recursion threshold.
All I request is a nice hat. Astra's not a Pokemon protagonist without a nice hat of some kind. Hmm, actually...
May, seen here acting her age.
These are more connected then you might think. Based on the archeological record, humans became anatomically modern (including the full range of vocalisations modern humans make) a 2-3 hundred thousand years before things like representational artwork and a wide variety of crafted stone tools start becoming common (around 40-60k years ago). Combine this with modern observations of humans who were not exposed to language early in life, and it seems that what we think of as our intrinsic general intelligence and creativity is actually learned behaviour. Further, it must be learned early in life, or the neural pruning algorithms conclude you don't need it and take it away.
Well, only during the formation phase. Once it was a thing, I don´t think many would deny that our intelligence is one of the main reasons our species survived.
Huh? What are you talking about? As far as I know humans were surviving just fine before, and could have continued to do so. Of course something would have killed them off eventually, but no more so then any other large mammal.
Clearly Astra needs to wear mittens as an excuse
