sarahfu replied to your post :I’ve been working my way through Ultra Moon and...
“how dare you preserve your pokemon” says the 10-year-old with 500 wild rats locked in PC stasis
lamphoera replied to your post: I’ve been working my way through Ultra Moon and...
it’s not inherently wrong but the implication is that she’s done it out of her own desire to control every aspect of the things she considers worthy of her love, culminating in ultimately freezing them so she can “enjoy” them in a way they have no way of objecting to – which makes her accusation of the player doing the same hit harder as well.
These are really good points, it’s addressing the morality of a basic game conceit (gotta catch ‘em all!) while directly drawing comparisons between the villain and the player.
fourteengpc replied to your post: I’ve been working my way through Ultra Moon and...
I guess maybe it’s partly because she’s never explicitly stated to be using them for scientific research– it’s just a morbid and possibly unethical (if we go with the ‘she froze them alive’ theory) personal collection for her amusement, like an eccentric billionaire who keeps things like mummies and extinct animals in private galleries
I guess that’s still my point - it’s undeniably weird, but even then I don’t see the issue with doing those things? Or at least I don’t find them personally unethical. I absolutely think their purpose was to expand on Lusamine’s inability to let go, but as mentioned above, it also asks the player to re-evaluate their pokemon collections. Shiny collections and the pokebank are... basically the exact same thing? Which is most likely The Point.
Of course, this point is kind of loses its edge in the context of Poke Pelago - you no longer keep your collection in stasis, but you do send them off to toil in the mines, so uh, I’m not sure if that’s really any better.