I'll be your dipping sauce ***** if people stop complaining about this. (tee-hee, reference)rancher of monsters said:
Is the 9/11 Pokemon offensive?
- Thread starter rancher of monsters
- Start date
Absolutely not. Not only was that article factually incorrect (Kyurem's height was actually a typo - it is 9 feet 10 inches tall, not 11. This typo has since been fixed on it's Bulbapedia page.), it's just blatantly grasping at straws. In the games, KYUREM HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CASTELIA OR NIMBASA CITY. In fact, Kyurem is found in a place called the Giant Chasm, which is nowhere near Route 4 - it's on Route 13, which isn't even accessible until after the player defeats the Elite Four. And yes, the Giant Chasm was formed by a meteor strike, but let me reiterate that while Route 4 is in South-Central Unova, Route 13, the location of the Giant Chasm, is in the upper Northeastern part of the region.
To compare, Route 4:
And the Giant Chasm:
See? Absolutely nowhere near Route 4. And for that matter, Route 4 itself. Yes, it's a desert with a constant sandstorm going on. But you know what else is going on there? Construction. Building. Making what is currently an uninhabitable place livable, and giving the place a fresh start. A clean slate, as it were, upon which the promise of a future is built on the innovation of the present. Far from being offensive, Route 4 is INSPIRING.
The only thing I find offensive about this article is that the writer would blow this entire thing so far out of proportion that they would grasp so desperately at straws just to make an article for cracked.com.
To compare, Route 4:
And the Giant Chasm:
See? Absolutely nowhere near Route 4. And for that matter, Route 4 itself. Yes, it's a desert with a constant sandstorm going on. But you know what else is going on there? Construction. Building. Making what is currently an uninhabitable place livable, and giving the place a fresh start. A clean slate, as it were, upon which the promise of a future is built on the innovation of the present. Far from being offensive, Route 4 is INSPIRING.
The only thing I find offensive about this article is that the writer would blow this entire thing so far out of proportion that they would grasp so desperately at straws just to make an article for cracked.com.
Seems like Americans are the same way.mr_rubino said:
While I wouldn't say you're shouting being in text and all, but you seem to be making the attempt to stifle a discussion you don't approve of, or at least you're projecting you don't approve of.mr_rubino said:
Believe what you want about free speech, but every nation has censorship and free speech is free so long as you don't piss someone off.mr_rubino said:
Tragedy is subjective, if you're American then yes, 9/11 was tragic, same goes for Euro's/Asians/Africans as far "tragic" events that occur within their nations. When you look at it objectively and understand that you're not the only ones in the world it helps take things into perspective.
The morale of the story: Bad things happen all the time, people make mistakes or poor decisions which cost human lives. The real tragedy is that this happens at all.
Wow. If those are the MOST offensive, I think we're in pretty good shape. One or two kinda made me twitch, but most of them are lame at worst. And the Pokémon one just isn't all that horrible.rancher of monsters said:
Call me dim if you must, but I would never have thought that area of the map was referencing Ground Zero. As for the pokemon's height and weight, I think that was the translator's idea. As someone has all ready pointed out, "feet" and "inches" aren't used in Japan, they use the metric system (something we tried to utilize in the 80s, got frustrated with when students complained that it was "hard" and ditched.)
But, if that really is what is being referenced, I am glad the creators put it in the game. 9/11 happened 10 years ago and Ground Zero is STILL under-construction, ground for most of the buildings not being broken until 2008, some in 2006. NO! I know the economy being messed up probably didn't help, but if 9/11 was so important, like everyone claims it was, then the Ground Zero buildings would be up and running yesterday.
There is no malice here, no mockery of the event or the place. The creators wanted to base the new location on New York and Ground Zero is a part of modern day New York. If people don't like seeing it in a video game, they should have supported the reconstruction of the site so that the creators of Pokemon didn't have to see a giant hole in the ground while touring the city.
And before people start shouting "It's an important location in our history! You can't just build over it!" let me say that it is (1) in the middle of a major city and (2) leaving it empty and fallow would only make things worse. Those that did the damage would see it as a sign of their triumph and those who were attacked would see it as an injure and just get angry.
Even in the ancient world, when cities were invaded, populations killed and buildings destroyed with in the cities, once the madness was over the government and the people would clear away the rubble, bury the dead and build a monument / temple on the site to honor the dead, remember the event and show the world that they were not conquered! The only places they would not build over were the battles fields where great conquests or defeats occurred.
But, if that really is what is being referenced, I am glad the creators put it in the game. 9/11 happened 10 years ago and Ground Zero is STILL under-construction, ground for most of the buildings not being broken until 2008, some in 2006. NO! I know the economy being messed up probably didn't help, but if 9/11 was so important, like everyone claims it was, then the Ground Zero buildings would be up and running yesterday.
There is no malice here, no mockery of the event or the place. The creators wanted to base the new location on New York and Ground Zero is a part of modern day New York. If people don't like seeing it in a video game, they should have supported the reconstruction of the site so that the creators of Pokemon didn't have to see a giant hole in the ground while touring the city.
And before people start shouting "It's an important location in our history! You can't just build over it!" let me say that it is (1) in the middle of a major city and (2) leaving it empty and fallow would only make things worse. Those that did the damage would see it as a sign of their triumph and those who were attacked would see it as an injure and just get angry.
Even in the ancient world, when cities were invaded, populations killed and buildings destroyed with in the cities, once the madness was over the government and the people would clear away the rubble, bury the dead and build a monument / temple on the site to honor the dead, remember the event and show the world that they were not conquered! The only places they would not build over were the battles fields where great conquests or defeats occurred.
I would like to point something out. "Americans" as a whole, are not actively bitching about 9/11. "Americans" in GENERAL are not actively bitching about 9/11 being a tragedy, especially on these forums, and especially in this topic. In fact, most American Escapist Users who have posted here thing the whole issue is over blown, and accept that, yes, 9/11 is not the worst fucking thing that has happened on the god damn planet. This was brought up by a notably cynical, sarcastic, and often absurd humor site.jonyboy13 said:
So please, could you explain why the general attitude of quite a few of the initial wave of posts here have been COMPLAINING ABOUT AMERICANS TALKING ABOUT 9/11.
Now we move on to you specifically. You, and the people who mentioned that worse stuff has happened in other countries are basically saying "hey, America, I feel really sorry for you and all, but [insert European/Asian/South American/African country here] had the worst tragedy of all time. If something shitty happened to someone you know, lets say, 10 years ago, and it is still bugging them, would you start ragging on them and bragging about how worse shit has happened to you, or even go as far to say it was their fault? Especially if the just wanted to leave it in the past? I imagine you would if you intentionally wanted to be a dick!
So why do that to an entire nationality. Americans feel bad about 9/11. So what if other countries, even YOUR country, has had worse shit happen. I imagine if a ton of Americans started bitching at the Japanese because "there have been worse tsunamis/earthquakes/volcanic eruptions/whatever the hell their nuclear problem is," any Japanese users would feel similar to how I, and I imagine several others feel right now.
I'd be more willing to accept that Reggie Fils-Aime snuck into everyone's houses while they were asleep and edited the games himself. First off, not everyone has wi-fi for their DS so that story falls flat (of course, that wouldn't bother some conspiracy theorists). And second, Reggie is just a bad-ass enough dude for me to believe that he'd do it. And to anyone who doesn't believe it, he doesn't have anything to say to you. He is just going to look at you:Sonic Doctor said:Yeah, they will say something to the effect that Nintendo hacked into everybody's game through WiFi and changed them to cover it up.mjc0961 said:Are they also going to say that every copy of the game has been tampered with? Because all the games say 9 feet 10 inches too. ...Actually, some of them probably are.Sonic Doctor said:
Har har har indeed.Trolldor said:
At least they aren't calling it "911" (read as "nine one one") though. 911 is an emergency phone number, not a date.
This, friends, is the very definition of "overthinking it."
When it's said that Unova was modeled after New York, they mean that the region is more bustling and active than previous generations. I'm quite sure that Kyurem's height of 9'11" wasn't intended at all--hell, the Japanese use metrics, and I doubt they'd go through the trouble of making sure it converted to that precise measurement for the US release.
People these days.
When it's said that Unova was modeled after New York, they mean that the region is more bustling and active than previous generations. I'm quite sure that Kyurem's height of 9'11" wasn't intended at all--hell, the Japanese use metrics, and I doubt they'd go through the trouble of making sure it converted to that precise measurement for the US release.
People these days.
this. i highly facepalm when people read to much into things..it happens way too often.ninjastovall0 said:
hahahahahha that is hilarious. thank you for posting that.thaluikhain said:That's very "WTF"? but not actually offensive. A fictional NYC having a fictional WTC site...fair enoguh...the 9'11 thing is very odd though.
On the other hand, every time their's a crash, we hear the same "What was that last thing through ____'s mind?" jokes, and people laugh at those.
Depends when, though, by now passions have cooled quite a bit, it's increasingly safe to mention.
American here. Just wanna reenforce the general consensus on this thread that 9/11 is one of the most overly dramatized and exaggerated "tragedies" in american history. I was 8 when it happened, and now over half of my life has been spent surrounded by the goings-on of these wretched middle eastern conflicts. I fucking hate it. Yeah, a lot of people died that day, but guess what, my fellow Americans? the body count is STILL going up, in nations that had NOTHING to do with god damned 9/11, which while I can never say was anything less then tragic, we need to fucking SUCK IT UP and realize we need to GET OVER OURSELVES and stop dealing out the equivalent to a 9/11 attack to a middle eastern town daily at the tip of a cruise missile.ShadowsofHope said:
HEy rest of America? remember Pearl Harbor? We don't seem that bent out of shape over that still, now do we.
So we freak out about a spicy hidden undertone of 9/11 representation, but when someone makes a joke about Japan getting nuked all the sudden it's not as bad.
Could the thread-opener edit this into the original post, please? Because loads of people are posting offended comments on the 8th page about this without OBVIOUSLY reading anything in between, when the connection has been entirely debunked.Emerald_Dragonite said:Absolutely not. Not only was that article factually incorrect (Kyurem's height was actually a typo - it is 9 feet 10 inches tall, not 11. This typo has since been fixed on it's Bulbapedia page.), it's just blatantly grasping at straws. In the games, KYUREM HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CASTELIA OR NIMBASA CITY. In fact, Kyurem is found in a place called the Giant Chasm, which is nowhere near Route 4 - it's on Route 13, which isn't even accessible until after the player defeats the Elite Four. And yes, the Giant Chasm was formed by a meteor strike, but let me reiterate that while Route 4 is in South-Central Unova, Route 13, the location of the Giant Chasm, is in the upper Northeastern part of the region.
To compare, Route 4:
And the Giant Chasm:
See? Absolutely nowhere near Route 4. And for that matter, Route 4 itself. Yes, it's a desert with a constant sandstorm going on. But you know what else is going on there? Construction. Building. Making what is currently an uninhabitable place livable, and giving the place a fresh start. A clean slate, as it were, upon which the promise of a future is built on the innovation of the present. Far from being offensive, Route 4 is INSPIRING.
The only thing I find offensive about this article is that the writer would blow this entire thing so far out of proportion that they would grasp so desperately at straws just to make an article for cracked.com.
And the rest of the article is ridiculous too. The end of a film references 9/11 and... That's offensive? I mean, it didn't mock it or even overly expose it. It's just there. And it came out of nowhere, just like IRL. Is it that big of a taboo to even mention the day?!
I'm actually kind of proud of responses like this in this thread. It seems like the emotional scar of the event is FINALLY healing just like those things naturally do. I always got the feeling that there was an aggressive agenda feverishly trying to sanctify the event as a milestone in planetary history of biblical proportions (which is frankly quite insensitive in itself - it ignores the victims in favour of "wounded pride"). I'm glad the posters here are taking it far more rationally than that.Wintermute_ said:
As a 6-year-old child, I survived a war that claimed about 20,000 lives, and displaced almost a million people. There was actual fear of a foreign aggressor marching into our suburban utopia, butchering people and hiding them in mass graves. And even with this kind of emotional scar that Americans probably won't ever experience (but still put themselves through in Homefront and its ilk, for baffling reasons), my entire country almost completely got over what happened in less than a decade, and more effort has been poured into burying old hatreds with what was once "the enemy". It's now "our fellow neighbour" and the rare ethnic hate against them sparks unanimous public outrage. It wasn't a perfect recovery, but it went quite well!
I thought 9/11 was getting the opposite treatment, and that it would remain untouchable for quite a while longer. I'm glad this thread is largely proving me wrong.
You know, if you look at the supposed "Ground Zero" in pokemon, you can see parts where workers are doing construction on unfinished buildings. Also if this really is based off of New York, what does the desert ruins represent? Or the Dream yard? And what location represents Central Park? I really am interested in this.Alorxico said:
I don't think most of you really understand 9/11 as Americans do. And for the Americans here that don't seem to really give a fuck - well, that says more about you're age vs your ignorance: you were either too young to really comprehend the changes that the attack brought with it, or you were too ignorant and self-absorbed to give a shit about anything outside watching the next episode of Pokemon to care anyways.
TBH, the attacks stick with us not just because of the property damage or the body count - hell, we've had worse. The stigma remains because of the clusterfuck that happened afterwards.
Because of that attack, it gave an idiot president overwhelming support in both congress and the senate to have two or so shit wars in countries vaguely-related to the event based on scanty evidence. In that time, said idiot president also passed a shit-ton of legislation that heavily restricted personal liberty and civilian legal power under the name of emergency power and national security.
Because of how well the aforementioned idiot president handled the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he had a strong enough support base to win a second four-year term. Now going eight years with this idiot, our economy turned from a plain recession to a depression and kept the war going, putting us in a trillion-dollar debt.
I personally am not that sentimental about the direct attacks, but to say that it is a negligible part of US history is to express childish ignorance.
9/11 was the true end of the 1990's for us - it was when that big dot-com bubble that gave us a surplus economy busted, it was when our interior national attitude went from bloated-but-easy-going superpower to intensely-paranoid and semi-xenophobic (airport security, for one, was much more concerned about getting you on the plane than checking your underwear for in-woven explosives). Because of all the wars we started out of the fear and panic of the attack, we went from the big and arrogant superpower that occasionally annoyed everyone else in the international community to the most openly-hated. It was our entrance from a decade of ease to one of unrest and hardship that will probably continue into the next one.
tldr; 9/11 itself wasn't that bad comparatively. It was the aftermath, which we still feel today.
*EDIT: Oh yeah, and the Pokemon thing really isn't that offensive. Sure, a little wonky in the way anything from Japan is lost in cultural translation, but not truly offensive.
Of course, the smartest thing they could have done would have been to avoid it entirely and just have it as 'inspired' by NYC minus 9/11. New York was around LONG before 9/11. 9/11 certainly didn't put it on the map.
But playing devil's advocate: it would be like creating a giant mouse pokemon that uses radiation and atom-themed attacks that resides in a power plant in a map that was 'inspired' by the Russian country side and calling it Chernobylchu.
TBH, the attacks stick with us not just because of the property damage or the body count - hell, we've had worse. The stigma remains because of the clusterfuck that happened afterwards.
Because of that attack, it gave an idiot president overwhelming support in both congress and the senate to have two or so shit wars in countries vaguely-related to the event based on scanty evidence. In that time, said idiot president also passed a shit-ton of legislation that heavily restricted personal liberty and civilian legal power under the name of emergency power and national security.
Because of how well the aforementioned idiot president handled the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he had a strong enough support base to win a second four-year term. Now going eight years with this idiot, our economy turned from a plain recession to a depression and kept the war going, putting us in a trillion-dollar debt.
I personally am not that sentimental about the direct attacks, but to say that it is a negligible part of US history is to express childish ignorance.
9/11 was the true end of the 1990's for us - it was when that big dot-com bubble that gave us a surplus economy busted, it was when our interior national attitude went from bloated-but-easy-going superpower to intensely-paranoid and semi-xenophobic (airport security, for one, was much more concerned about getting you on the plane than checking your underwear for in-woven explosives). Because of all the wars we started out of the fear and panic of the attack, we went from the big and arrogant superpower that occasionally annoyed everyone else in the international community to the most openly-hated. It was our entrance from a decade of ease to one of unrest and hardship that will probably continue into the next one.
tldr; 9/11 itself wasn't that bad comparatively. It was the aftermath, which we still feel today.
*EDIT: Oh yeah, and the Pokemon thing really isn't that offensive. Sure, a little wonky in the way anything from Japan is lost in cultural translation, but not truly offensive.
Of course, the smartest thing they could have done would have been to avoid it entirely and just have it as 'inspired' by NYC minus 9/11. New York was around LONG before 9/11. 9/11 certainly didn't put it on the map.
But playing devil's advocate: it would be like creating a giant mouse pokemon that uses radiation and atom-themed attacks that resides in a power plant in a map that was 'inspired' by the Russian country side and calling it Chernobylchu.
I mean, I'm australian, so I don't really find it offensive, but I understand why people would. This is tasteless to the extreme.
That didn't offend me at all. Though...I must admit. Those candies at the number one slot seem to be just a little tasteless.
I live in New York, but I dont get offended by 9/11 stuff. Even if this was true, it wouldnt bother me. What DOES bother me is the way you worded your response. I get your point, but dont say you americans like all of us are the same. Considering we are the most not the same than any country in the world, its very ignorant.ShadowsofHope said:
