>>55176135I don't need to tell you adults do NOT tell the media the whole story regarding the creation of something, especially when that something has morphed from a kiddy-coded moncap SMT rip off to a global phenomenon bordering on a pandemic (20-0somethings are still 20-somethings - oversexed, horny, hubristic and egotistical. And Tajiri DID ok adding new content to a game already debugged and signed off as master copy before Gen 1 got delivered, so he ain't the usual uptight old-fashioned CEO. He'd denied it back at the time those interviews (You) parrot, so his words clearly can't be taken at face value). Unlike pandemics and fads however, it persisted. And unlike kid's media in general, it leaned into and continued to support the poképhilia angle throughout the years - from mentioning humans married pokémon to outright portraying a pokémon that canonically had offspring with a human.
Almost as if the pokémon world is just Japanese folklore, adapted to a near-earth environment and assumed to be true. Just like Japanese folklore talks about animals marrying humans, the magical beasts that replace them are treated as little less than sentient, sapient, emotionally literate intelligent creatures taht live much closer existences to humans than animals in the real world where folklore is just that - the collective stories told by humans trying to explain the world around them before progress allowed them to actually study and understand the world around him ("the sun gets pushed across the sky by a big scarab beetle", instead of "the earth spins on its axis, exposing its surface to the sun's side gradually in rotation over a period of 24-ish hours").
