To be honest, these kinds of posts are really annoying. I support trans rights and all of that, but the original post feels like it’s just virtue signaling for upvotes. All of the “<character> says trans rights” posts are the same. If some find it affirming then that’s great but it makes no sense to share in general communities where it doesn’t contribute anything.
I can’t tell if you didn’t look at the tail or if you’re just not as much of a Pokemon nerd as I am.
Oooh, took me a while to get tbh. I assumed this Pikachu was always a girl, but they gave her tail surgery. I think it would’ve been more obvious if I wasn’t distracted by the giant fist.
Politics is when people have rights.
Yes, it is
The post isn’t even just a trans flag, it actually has meaning. The tail has a little ‘heart shaped thing’ taped on it so that means the Pikachu in the photo is transfemme because female Pikachus have heart shaped tails
THATS SO CUTE AAAA 😭😭
Oh wow, neat. Appreciate your comment I had no idea.
That is very funny, great detail
Ahh, the three genders: male, female and political.
unless you’re a gamer™ —then there would be two genders, male and political
Well, otherwise it would ruin your immersion
“I deserve to exist”
“wow, why did you have to make things political”
A statement dreamt up by the utterly deranged.
Hey, leave my math memes alone.
Removed by mod
If any minority group was being systemically oppressed, I would absolutely love if the shows and games my children were into included messaging of the problem and how every human is inherently equal.
And you may think your wording is hyperbole, but trans people are actually being exterminated in parts of the world and imprisoned in others, and are actively having their rights and legal identities taken away in the US as well.
People upset about seeing trans messaging are the same people who would say “i don’t care about people being gay but stop shoving it down my throat” when they saw one gay couple kiss on tv that month while also seeing 100 straight couples kissing.
Removed by mod
Google “anti trans laws 2024” right quick. Trans folk are constantly fighting against being made illegal and hate-crimed in the streets, even in the “land of the free”.
actually on second thought, @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone I feel like this is worth a ping to take a look at
Thanks. Dealt with
I disagree with several premises. I wouldn’t want my children’s shows to shoehorn in messages. If it makes sense in the plot for the characters to have and voice an opinion, or if it’s a cleverly written allegory, then that’s great. If they are just creating a character for the exclusive purpose of pushing an agenda (even one I agree with) it’s annoying.
Whenever someone says “people doing X, are the same people doing Y.” You’re witnessing some broad sweeping generalizations that are usually just the writers opinions. You can just remove the X statement.
I don’t like when protesters block my road on the way to work, or shove pictures of dead children in people’s faces, but I still can agree with protests against wars etc. Not liking the mode of messaging doesn’t equate to disallowing the massage and that’s fair. Personally, I encourage people to disrupt the actual power structure in place instead of the general population, but that’s just me.
You might have a point if trans people weren’t being victimized by violence at a massively higher rate. At this point telling trans people they aren’t allowed to advocate for their presence is the same as telling them to die quietly please.
You are not obligated to engage with their content.
There is one trangender NPC in the main series of Pokémon games:
She’s pretty explicitly trans in the Japanese version and heavily implied to be trans in the English version.
Sadly, the implication is removed in the Korean and German versions.Meanwhile…
one out of three female Azurill evolves into a male Marill
Sadly, this only happens in generations 3-5.
Azurill looks so much happier after evolving to Marill, so good for them.
This is a really niche interaction, so I find it funny when some Youtuber comes across it.
There’s a Pokemon episode where Pikachu tapes its tail into the heart shape to feign being a female Pikachu(was one of the handful of episodes where Ash cd’ed for something). Really just isn’t political, trans pride colors and all.
I am saying this as someone who regularly looks at topics that are either very political or very heated or both and decides that I simply do not have the energy for discourse. Also how much of an asshole do you have to be to throw a fit over what would have likely been a very positive and wholesome thread prior to people trying to tear it down?
At first, I thought the original original post was just arbitrarily using the Pokémon franchise to platform for transgender people, but the OP has modified a pre-fab model of a male Pikachu to turn it into a female Pikachu by adding the two bumps at the end of the tail. The gender dimorphism between Pikachu is fairly obscure knowledge so I can see why somebody might miss the point of that post.
I want to also note that this is something that actually happened in the show. There’s a particular Pikachu (not Ash’s) that shows up with a paper heart taped to their tail.
So, the show was already saying trans rights, this dumbass just didn’t notice.
From what I can find, it seems like that may have been Ash’s Pikachu in disguise with a cross-dressing Ash to enter a women’s only organization. It’s possible that there was another instance but I’m not seeing it. This article and the Trivia section of this article may be informative about the history of changing gender expressions in the shows and games.
There’s a particular Pikachu (not Ashs) that shows up with a paper heart taped to their tail.
that’s so sweet 😭😭
Oh that’s cool! Thanks for pointing that out.
Not trying to be offensive in any way but wouldn’t the correct term be sexual dimorphism instead of gender dimorphism since sexual traits are more physical traits and gender is more soical?
I did consider using the term “sexual dimorphism” instead, but within the context of the post, “gender dimorphism” felt more correct. The biological sex and chromosomes of the pre-fab Pikachu model would stay the same, but its outward appearance and gender expression has changed to become feminine.
As a real life analogy, lion manes are an example of sexual dimorphism, but due to either hormonal abnormalities and/or a shortage of males, lionesses may grow manes and occupy the masculine role; a mane is sexually dimorphic for lions, but it becomes gender dimorphic for the lionesses who adopt the masculine role in their pride.
Also, as far as I’m aware, within Pokémon media and even within the programming code, they do use gendered terms but they never say the word “sex” specifically, so there is ambiguity within the fictional universe on top of the ambiguity of our own universe’s terminologies and schemata.
You used the term while describing the natural differences between pikachus in the base game. That would be sexual dimorphism, a physical difference between the two sexes.
What we see in the OP could be termed gender dimorphism, but you were refering to the feature of the base game when you used the term, which is very likely the devs intended to be sexual dimorphism. The gender dismprphism mimics the sexual dismorphism to display its role.
I tried to do a little more research to define the differences between the terms but unfortunately gender dimorphism is not a common term used in biology and sexual dimoprhism seems to be used across the board
I wanted my conclusion sentence to be an umbrella term that would apply to both the games/anime and instances such as in the post; that’s why I chose “gender dimorphism” instead of the more limiting “sexual dimorphism”. My terminology was not meant to refer to only one specific use case and exclude another and I’m confused as to why you’d interpret it as that.
Yes, the devs did intend it to act as sexual dimorphism, but there are fringe instances in the animal kingdom and in the Pokémon fandom (and possibly in canon) in which that term does not sufficiently describe an animal’s changed physical and social characteristics. The lioness manes that I had mentioned and the above post are some of those instances.
today i learned… Thank you!
Does anyone know how to name a female Pikachu?
Pikachu’ette?
Pikachu ♀
Simple as
The most concerning part is that the JustUnsubbed post has a positive number of votes. Reddit really has become more deranged than ever
Justunsubbed is mostly conservatives bitching about their hobbies moving left without them. I went through the list a few times to find subreddits I hadn’t heard of, and found the communities they were bitching about to be universally less insufferable than the people at justunsubbed.
ok tbf it sounds like a subreddit that’s just there for people to whine in
That’s most of being conservative though.
exactly
And 269 upvotes WTF?
Please Trans Right ≠ Politics
Politics drives lawmaking. Ignore it if you want, but when laws are passed that make your life or society worse, what story will you tell yourself?
We all understand the frustration of politics. But it’s still relevant.
If it makes you feel any better, /r/JustUnsubbed is just a right wing echo chamber. Most of the time people are “unsubbing” from subs that are simply friendly towards minorities.
Trans rights absolutely is political, especially when an incoming president decides that they should be barred from existing. It shouldn’t be, but such is the way of the world nowadays.
I meant it’s same as basic human right not some sort of stupid political agenda
that’s a bit of a loaded response. Do you not consider fighting for your rights a political subject? note how i didn’t comment on said rights.
Honestly, the fact that sexuality and gender are a political issue at all seems really silly when you break it down. Just let people fuck who they wanna fuck (with consenting adults, of course) and do what they want with their own body. If body mods like piercings and tattoos were this heavily regulated pretty much everyone would think it’s the dumbest shit ever. You can get a tattoo and a piercing on your dick but if you wanna remove your dick entirely it’s for some reason wrong? A woman can get breast implants but if anyone else does that’s also wrong for some reason?
Edit: Wording.
This is because of the role religion plays in politics. Religion should have nothing to do with politics in modern times.
There is plenty of homophobe, transphobe, racist and otherwise bigoted people that have nothing to do with religion.
And if people would take their religion seriously instead of using it as a superficial scapegoat, cherrypicking what they like, there would be no capitalism.
Horrible people would exist without religion but religion is the biggest and easiest tool to use to get a mass of people to act horribly and believe horrible things. And the inverse is true too. Horrible people have used their religion as a way to act horribly.
Which is why we must be advocates for Satanism. Surely if i have the right to practice whichever religion i want, i (as a Satanist) should be able to carry out abortions and sleep with the same sex right?
Religion is what gives these people the excuse.
It’s their own prejudices that play into politics.
You must have your daily 2 minutes of hate, otherwise you might realize the people you hate are trying to give you healthcare and make groceries affordable.
‘Legally’ isn’t the best choice of words here, IMO. I’m not saying we should be allowed to fuck minors (ew) but that the legal system has been used to opress and punish queer people. In some jurisdictions, it is legal to kill gay people. So using legality as your baseline is a bad idea.
Morality is I think what you’re getting at. But then you get into the weeds of subjective morality and that’s a mess…
Yeah that’s totally fair. I only added it as an after thought because I feel like not adding something like that would have been worse. Maybe just “consenting adults” instead of “legally.”
Just let people fuck who they wanna fuck (legally, of course)
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying I just want to play devils advocate a bit with this statement. It seems sort of odd to caveat a statement that appears unrestrictive with a restriction. I understand why you did it but you conceded the fact that there should be limits on who you can fuck within a statement that, when taken at face value, should mean you can fuck whoever you want. That seems a bit cumbersome doesn’t it?
Replace “legally” with “with consent”
Minors can’t consent. Animals can’t consent. Beyond that, as long as everyone participating consents to it, I don’t see why it would be anyone else’s business
I already changed the original comment. Makes more sense that way anyway.
Yeah that makes sense. I mostly did it because if I didn’t add that caveat I feel like it would have been worse. Maybe if instead I just said “consenting adults.” Poor choices of words on my part.
Pokemon is a non-political IP where checks notes the evil group usually torture pokemon, and oftentimes want to change the world to better reflect their ideal world.
Pokemon became political when checks notes again you treat people like people when they change THEIR body and don’t expect anything more from you than before
As yes, makes sense. What is next? A Pokemon that can transform in other pokemon? A Pokemon that dresses up like a different kind pokemon? I bet the woke pokemon company will release a black Charizard that is more special as the original Charizard./s
Fuck morons. In a world, where everything is political, they manage to point at a 9yo girl wearing pants in a movie and claim that it is political.
Edit: THEY ARE LEAVING THEIR HOBBIES AND PASSIONS OVER THIS! THEY ARE LEAVING THEIR COMMUNITIES OVER THIS! that is mental.
Wait, so all of you unironically believe that a real human being posted this to Reddit just to show off, and then another real human being reposted it to a hate sub, and you all believe that these are independently acting humans are just being humans, on the human populated website Reddit?
So often, “politics” just means “stuff I don’t like.” People don’t think of “stuff I do like” as politics. And that’s not a right-wing phenomenon. It’s common across the political spectrum.
(This isn’t me spouting “both sides” nonsense. The poster in that screenshot is a bigoted dumbass and a horrible human being. I’d have a lot more respect for someone quitting a Pokemon community that was rife with anti-LGBT bigotry even if the reason they gave was “it was too political”. It’s still frustrating to see the term “politics” (mis?)used in that way by people I otherwise respect, though.)
Everything’s politics. “That’s too political” is a copout non-statement. Have the guts to say what you mean.
